AI Engineer - Startups & Partnerships

Citigroup; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days annual leave

Discretionary annual bonus

Private Medical Care & Life Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Pension Plan

Paid Parental Leave

Discounts for employees, family and朋友

Learning and development resources

Job summary

Citi Belfast is seeking an AI Engineer to join the Startups & Partnerships team, driving the design, testing, and deployment of AI-powered solutions that address real business problems across the bank.

You will work with LLMs, agentic frameworks, and modern AI tooling in a fast-paced environment, collaborating with stakeholders and startups to move at startup speed within a regulated global institution.

Qualifications

• A full-stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience; not a pure data science or ML research role.
• Proven experience building and shipping AI applications, pipelines, and workflows in live, production environments.
• Hands-on proficiency with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across backend services, APIs, and front-end/ tooling layers.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management; able to work with business leaders and clients.
• Experience adopting new tools/ platforms quickly in a changing AI landscape.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI applications - architect, develop, and deploy production‑grade AI tools and pipelines across Citi's lines of business.
• Evaluate emerging AI technology - run structured PoCs and bake-offs for real‑world fit.
• Prototype at speed - turn business ideas into working demos in days, iterating with feedback.
• Integrate across the stack - connect LLMs and systems to enterprise APIs and data pipelines.
• Deliver PoCs into production pathways - collaborate with governance, risk, and platform teams.
• Communicate impact - translate technical work into clear narratives for senior stakeholders.

Skills

Full-stack engineer

Applied AI/LLM

Production AI pipelines

LLMs & prompt engineering

Software fundamentals

Stakeholder management

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

AutoGen

Docker

Kubernetes

APIs & integrations

Job description

About the Team

The Startups & Partnerships team is the forward scout of the Citi's Head of AI Organization. Our mandate: identify, evaluate, and rapidly onboard the emerging technologies that will define Citi's next chapter with Artificial Intelligence as our number one strategic priority right now. We don't sit in a lab waiting for ideas to trickle in. We move across every line of business at Citi, sit down directly with business stakeholders and clients, and go toe-to-toe with the sharpest startups and frontier AI labs in the market. We run fast, we run lean, and we run with the full weight of a global institution behind us.

Role

As an AI Engineer on the Startups & Partnerships team, you will be at the tip of the spear for Citi's AI strategy - building, testing, and shipping real applications that touch real business problems across the bank, not writing whitepapers about them from the sidelines. You'll get a level of exposure that's rare in a Tier-1 global bank: direct access to business requirements, hands‑on evaluation of the newest models and platforms from the industry's leading AI labs, and the mandate to move at startup speed inside an institution operating at global scale. If you want to build things that matter, get them in front of real users fast, and shape how one of the world's largest financial institutions adopts AI - this is the seat.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI applications - architect, develop, and deploy production‑grade AI‑powered tools, pipelines, and workflows that solve real business problems across Citi's lines of business.
• Evaluate emerging AI technology - run structured proof‑of‑concepts and sandbox "bake-offs" to rapidly assess new models, platforms, and startup tools (LLMs, agentic frameworks, orchestration layers) for real‑world fit.
• Prototype at speed - turn a business idea into a working demo in days, not quarters, and iterate quickly based on stakeholder feedback.
• Integrate across the stack - connect LLMs and agentic systems to enterprise APIs, data pipelines, and lightweight front‑end or tooling layers to deliver end‑to‑end working solutions.
• Deliver PoCs into production pathways - work with governance, risk, and platform teams to shepherd validated solutions from prototype toward scaled deployment.
• Communicate impact - translate technical work into clear, compelling narratives for senior business and technology stakeholders.

Skills & Experience

• A full‑stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience - this is explicitly not a data science or ML research role. We need builders, not modelers.
• Proven experience building and shipping AI applications, pipelines, and workflows in live, production environments - not just notebooks and academic experiments.
• Hands‑on proficiency with Large Language Models (LLMs) , prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks and orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals - comfortable working across the stack, from backend services and API integrations to lightweight front‑end or internal tooling layers.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills - you can work directly with business leaders and clients, not just other engineers.
• A track record of learning and adopting new tools and platforms quickly as the AI landscape evolves.
• Comfort operating in a large, regulated, global institution while bringing a startup‑speed mentality to your work.
• Experience working directly with startups, venture teams, or technology scouting functions. (Desirable)
• Familiarity with vector databases, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), or knowledge graph‑based retrieval. (Desirable)
• Experience with containerization and cloud‑native deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI services. (Desirable)
• Prior exposure to financial services, banking, or other highly regulated industries. (Desirable)
• Experience presenting technical concepts to non‑technical, senior business audiences. (Desirable)

What we'll provide you

By joining Citi Belfast, 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
• Access to an array of learning and development resources

Visit our Global Benefits page to learn more.

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.

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Job Family Group: Technology