Senior Forward Deployed Engineer - Vice President

Citi; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days annual leave

Discretional annual bonus

Private Medical Care & Life Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Pension Plan

Paid Parental Leave

Special discounts for employees

Job summary

Citi London is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to embed within line-of-business squads and deliver production-grade agent reasoning, tool integrations, data pipelines, and resilient workflows. You will write modular Python, Java or Go, integrate with enterprise systems, and ensure security and quality standards.

Join a hands-on, hybrid role with direct business collaboration and a focus on rapid delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 4+ years of strong, professional Python, Java, or Go proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Develop production-grade agent reasoning logic and dynamic tool calling.
• Build and maintain MCP servers and API connectors for enterprise systems.
• Develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) components and embeddings workflows.
• Implement resilient error handling, retry mechanisms, and HITL escalation triggers.
• Create deterministic validation layers using Pydantic and JSON Schema.
• Integrate real-time AI guardrail policies for prompt safety and redaction.
• Collaborate with business users to capture domain logic and edge cases.
• Participate in agile sprints and code reviews to ensure quality.

Skills

Python programming

Java

Go

REST APIs

GRPC

Structured prompts

Prompt engineering

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Tools

Docker

Git

Linux

CI/CD

Job description

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 build reliable agent workflows, integrate AI with enterprise systems and ensure solutions perform securely and consistently in production.

With a strong focus on hands-on engineering, collaboration and rapid delivery, the Factory gives you the opportunity to solve challenging technical problems, develop your expertise and contribute reusable tools and engineering practices that support AI adoption 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

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer is a hands-on core engineering professional embedded within Line of Business squads. This role is responsible for developing production-grade agent reasoning logic, custom tool integrations, data retrieval pipelines, and resilient execution workflows adhering to enterprise safety, security, and quality standards.

Responsibilities:

• Agent Reasoning & Logic Implementation: Write clean, modular, production-quality Python code implementing agent reasoning loops, dynamic tool calling, short-term/long-term memory management, and sub-agent delegation.
• Tool & MCP Server Development: Build and maintain custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and API connectors integrating AI agents with enterprise systems (, ticketing systems, relational/NoSQL databases, message queues, and internal REST/gRPC microservices).
• Data Ingestion & Retrieval Pipelines: Develop and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) components, including document parsing, embedding generation, vector indexing, metadata filtering, and semantic search retrieval.
• Resilience & Error Handling: Implement resilient error handling, automated retry mechanisms with exponential backoff, circuit breaking, fallback routines, and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) escalation triggers for ambiguous model outputs.
• Structured Output Validation: Build deterministic validation layers using Pydantic and JSON Schema to guarantee structured, type-safe outputs from non-deterministic foundation models.
• Safety & Guardrail Integration: Integrate real-time AI guardrail policies for prompt injection defense, jailbreak mitigation, and automated PII filtering/redaction into agent execution loops.
• Collaborative Testing & Evals: Partner with C12 engineers to construct automated regression testbeds, curate golden datasets, and integrate automated evaluation suites into CI/CD release pipelines.
• Agile Sprint Delivery & Peer Review: Actively participate in agile sprint delivery, technical problem-solving sessions, and peer code reviews, coaching junior engineers on software craftsmanship.
• Direct Business Collaboration: Collocates and collaborates directly with Line of Business end-users (traders, bankers, analysts) to observe day-to-day operational workflows and capture nuanced domain logic and edge cases.
• Iterative Prototype Building: Rapidly builds, tests, and refines functional agent prototypes and prompt chains based on direct, daily qualitative feedback from business pilot users.
• User Friction Analysis: Analyzes user interaction logs and user feedback to identify model failure modes, prompt ambiguities, and UI/UX friction, implementing iterative improvements to agent reasoning.
• Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citi, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to Policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency.

Qualifications:

• Total Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 4+ years of strong, professional Python, Java, or Go proficiency.
• LLM & AI Engineering: 1-2+ years of hands-on experience working with foundation model APIs (, centralized enterprise AI gateways, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, Anthropic) and integrating LLMs into backend services.
• Software Engineering Fundamentals: Solid experience in REST/gRPC API development, Docker, Git workflows, Linux environments, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Prompt & Data Engineering: Proven understanding of advanced prompt engineering techniques, structured output parsing, vector databases, and retrieval strategies.
• Experience collaborating directly with business stakeholders, product managers, or operational users in rapid, iterative delivery cycles.

Education:

• Bachelor's/University degree or equivalent experience; Master's degree preferred.

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.