Lead / Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (SVP) in London

About the Team: Build the next generation of agentic AI. The Applied AI and Agents Factory brings together ambitious engineers to turn advanced AI capabilities into production-ready solutions. Working directly with business and technology teams, you'll tackle complex engineering challenges, build intelligent agents and take ideas from initial concept through to live deployment. This is an opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI engineering, developing systems that go beyond conversational tools to reason, plan and execute multi-step workflows. You'll take ownership of the full engineering lifecycle, from agent architecture and orchestration to enterprise integration, security and observability. With a strong focus on hands-on engineering, collaboration and rapid delivery, the Factory gives you the opportunity to solve challenging technical problems, influence architectural decisions and help shape reusable tools and engineering standards adopted across Citi. If you want to do more than experiment with AI - and build, deploy and scale systems that deliver real business value - this is where you can make your mark.

About the Role: As a Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you'll provide senior technical leadership within an embedded business engineering team, architecting and delivering sophisticated, production-grade AI agent systems for critical banking workflows. Combining hands-on engineering with architectural ownership, you'll lead complex integrations across enterprise platforms, design secure and reliable agentic architectures, and establish high engineering standards. You'll also mentor fellow engineers and help turn successful solutions into reusable enterprise capabilities, extending the impact of your work well beyond individual projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical architecture and hands-on delivery within embedded business engineering teams, translating complex business challenges into scalable, production-ready AI solutions.
• Design, build and deploy end-to-end agentic workflows using Python, ADK, LangGraph and the Arc platform.
• Engineer integrations between AI agents and core banking systems, enterprise APIs, databases and microservices, including custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Design secure, resilient agent execution environments, implementing controls such as mTLS, OAuth2 token delegation, HashiCorp Vault and OpenShift container security.
• Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, rigorous code reviews, security assessments and technical mentoring of engineers.
• Partner with principal architects and business stakeholders to solve complex technical challenges and establish effective design patterns.
• Contribute proven architectures, reusable components and engineering blueprints back to Citi's enterprise AI platform, accelerating delivery and adoption across the firm.
• Champion responsible AI engineering, ensuring solutions meet security, regulatory, governance and risk-management requirements.

Skills & Experience

• Extensive software engineering experience, with a strong background in backend and distributed systems, alongside proven experience building and deploying production-grade LLM and agentic AI applications.
• Expert-level Python skills, including asynchronous programming with asyncio, state machines and the design of complex application workflows.
• Strong experience with distributed microservices, containerisation and orchestration technologies, including Docker and OpenShift.
• Proven ability to integrate enterprise APIs, relational and NoSQL databases, and event-streaming platforms such as Kafka into complex application architectures.
• Practical knowledge of agentic AI architectures, multi-step reasoning, tool orchestration and production LLM application development.
• Deep understanding of application security, zero-trust principles, authentication, authorisation and secure tool-execution environments.
• Experience leading technical design, resolving complex engineering challenges and setting high standards for software quality, reliability and security.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, influence technical direction and collaborate effectively with senior stakeholders across technology and business teams.
• A strong sense of ownership, sound engineering judgement and the ability to deliver in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment.

What we’ll provide you

This is a unique role that will put you in the position to be part of a new venture and actively drive change. Every day there will be new challenges that will help you develop new skills that can drive your career.

By joining Citi London, you will not only be part of a business casual workplace with a hybrid working model (up to 2 days working at home per week), but also receive a competitive base salary (which is annually reviewed), and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits such as:

• 27 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• A discretional annual performance related bonus
• Private Medical Care & Life Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Pension Plan
• Paid Parental Leave
• Special discounts for employees, family, and friends

Alongside these benefits Citi is committed to ensuring our workplace is where everyone feels comfortable coming to work as their whole self, every day. We want the best talent around the world to be energized to join us, motivated to stay and empowered to thrive.