Production Engineer - Vice President in London

The Production Engineer is a pivotal role within Citi's Technology organisation, responsible for designing, building, and operating the intelligent systems that underpin our global production environment. This is an engineering‑first position at the intersection of software craftsmanship, AI‑native development, and large‑scale distributed systems. As part of a multi‑year transformation journey, the successful candidate will help define what production engineering looks like in an era of autonomous agents, generative AI, and self‑healing infrastructure. You will be expected to write production‑grade code daily, design agentic workflows, and contribute meaningfully to the evolution of our AI engineering practices across Citi's India technology hub.

The role requires a comprehensive understanding of multiple areas within a function and how they interact to achieve the objectives of the function, applying in‑depth understanding of the business impact of technical contributions. You will be accountable for delivery of a full range of end‑to‑end projects and must communicate effectively to negotiate internally, planning short‑ to medium‑term actions and resources for your own area.

Responsibilities

• Designs, develops, and maintains production‑grade software systems with a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and operational excellence across Citi's global technology estate.
• Architects and implements agentic AI workflows — building autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and act across production environments with minimal human intervention.
• Applies advanced prompt engineering techniques to integrate large language models (LLMs) into operational tooling, incident response pipelines, and developer productivity platforms.
• Leads the development of AI‑native observability solutions — leveraging intelligent agents to detect anomalies, predict failures, and automate remediation before issues impact end users.
• Writes clean, well‑tested, and well‑documented code across the full stack; champions engineering best practices including code review, pair programming, and test‑driven development.
• Drives Continuous Delivery and Automation efforts across supported applications by means of Root Cause Analysis reviews, knowledge management, performance tuning, and user training.
• Operates and evolves CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure‑as‑Code tooling, and GitOps workflows to support rapid, safe delivery of software at scale.
• Collaborates with platform, data, and product engineering teams to embed AI capabilities into the production lifecycle — from deployment to decommission.
• Implements the Agile Framework through one of its implementations (SCRUM or Kanban) and ensures it integrates with overall organisation processes.
• Operates within a highly regulated financial environment, maintaining in‑depth understanding of compliance requirements and their implications for system design and data handling.
• Coaches and mentors team members on AI engineering practices, prompt design patterns, and agentic system architecture — fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence.
• Avidly communicates progress and project status across the organisation and ensures that stakeholders are managed appropriately throughout the execution period.
• Fosters a culture that promotes transparency and innovation for increased team productivity.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience in a critical software engineering or production engineering role with high business impact and a strong programming foundation (Java, Python, Go, or equivalent).
• Hands‑on experience with AI/ML engineering — including working with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or open‑source equivalents), embedding models, and vector databases.
• Proven expertise in prompt engineering: designing, iterating, and evaluating prompts for production use cases including classification, summarisation, code generation, and autonomous decision‑making.
• Experience designing and deploying agentic systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalent — including multi‑agent orchestration and tool‑use patterns.
• Excellent engineering skills and strong understanding of Software Development Lifecycle, GitOps, and modern DevSecOps practices.
• Excellent working knowledge of key computer science concepts (networking, operating systems, virtualisation, containerisation, etc.).
• Polyglot full‑stack developer mentality and ability to pick up new languages and skills.
• Excellent debugging and analytical skills: ability to isolate root cause across networking/infrastructure, application, and database stacks.
• Operational experience of deploying and running services at scale on top of Docker/Kubernetes stack and a service mesh (Istio or equivalent) is highly desirable.
• Operational experience with orchestration tools for CI/CD and Infrastructure‑as‑Code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, etc.) is highly desirable.
• Experience of delivering software using Agile delivery methodologies is a must (SCRUM/Kanban).
• Operational experience of using middleware technologies (MQ, Apache Kafka, etc.) to run services at scale is desirable.
• Strong experience with end‑to‑end observability stacks (Datadog, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, etc.) is desirable.
• Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical subject is desirable.
• Experience of senior stakeholder management.
• Consistently demonstrates clear and concise written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to operate in a global environment with on‑/near‑/off‑shore matrix reporting structures.

Human Qualities & Soft Skills

• Learnability — Rapidly acquires new skills, frameworks, and paradigms.
• Teachability — Receives feedback with openness and intellectual humility.
• Flexibility & Adaptability — Thrives in ambiguity.
• Engineering Mindset — Approaches every problem systematically.
• Product‑Minded Thinking — Understands that code serves users and business outcomes.
• Collaborative Spirit — Builds trust across disciplines.
• Intellectual Curiosity — Asks “why” before “how”.
• Ownership & Accountability — Takes end‑to‑end responsibility for what they build.

Benefits

• 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
• Access to an array of learning and development resources

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. Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.