AI Engineer - Startups & Partnerships - Citi

eFinancialCareers; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days annual leave

Discretional bonus

Private Medical Care

Life Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Pension Plan

Parental Leave

Learning resources

Job summary

Citi Belfast invites you to join as an AI Engineer on the Startups & Partnerships team, shaping Citi's AI strategy with real-world applications across the bank.

You will build, test, and ship production AI solutions, working with LLMs, orchestration tools, and cloud-native deployment in a regulated global institution, with startup-speed priorities.

Hybrid working up to 2 days at home, a competitive base salary and extensive benefits are provided.

Qualifications

• Full-stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience; not a pure data science role.
• Proven experience building and shipping AI applications in production environments.
• Hands-on proficiency with LLMs, prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across backend, APIs, and frontend/internal tooling.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management with business leaders.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship production-grade AI-powered tools, pipelines, and workflows across Citi’s lines of business.
• Evaluate emerging AI tech with structured PoCs and sandbox bake-offs.
• Prototype business ideas into working demos quickly.

Skills

AI/LLM experience

Production AI apps

LangChain / LlamaIndex / AutoGen

Full-stack software engineering

Stakeholder communication

Cloud-native deployment

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

LangChain

LlamaIndex

AutoGen

Job description

Discover your future at Citi

Working at Citi is far more than just a job. A career with us means joining a team of approximately 219,000 dedicated people from around the globe. At Citi, you'll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community and make a real impact.

Job Overview

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 ourGlobal Benefitspage to learn more.

Alongside these benefits Citi is committed to ensuring our workplace