Senior Software Engineer - AI Products (SVP)

Citi; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; 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

Employee discounts

Job summary

Citi London is seeking a Senior Software/AI Engineer to own end-to-end AI product development, from problem definition to deployment. You will build production-grade services for intelligent document processing, data extraction and workflow automation, applying Generative AI and LLMs with a focus on reliability, explainability, and auditability.

You will collaborate with Product, Risk, and Engineering teams in a fast-moving, regulated banking environment, delivering scalable, robust AI solutions

Qualifications

• Senior-level software engineering track record in production systems.
• Strong Python development and maintainable services.
• Experience applying Generative AI and LLMs to real business problems.
• Expertise in prompt design and model evaluation.
• Experience in Intelligent Document Processing, data extraction or NLP-based tasks.
• Exposure to MLflow and model evaluation methods is advantageous.
• Solid software architecture and modern delivery tooling knowledge.
• Experience with databases and Kubernetes/OpenShift advantageous.
• CI/CD and modern tooling exposure (Jenkins, uDeploy, Tekton, Harness).
• Awareness of regulated environments requiring resilience, explainability and auditability.
• Excellent communication and ability to work with diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and support high-quality, production-grade AI software and services.
• Own end-to-end technical solutions from definition to deployment and improvement.
• Develop Generative AI solutions for document processing, data extraction and workflow optimisation.
• Evaluate AI models, prompts and architectures; productionise effective approaches.
• Lead technical design and architecture of AI products ensuring resilience and explainability.
• Collaborate with Product, Risk and Engineering to meet regulatory requirements.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to shape product vision and roadmaps.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers.
• Improve engineering practices through code reviews and automated testing.
• Troubleshoot distributed systems and improve performance and scalability.
• Contribute to Citi’s AI technology and engineering standards.

Skills

Senior Software Engineer

AI Engineer

Technical Lead

Python development

Generative AI

LLM applications

Prompt design

Production AI solutions

Software architecture

PostgreSQL / Oracle

CI/CD tooling

Kubernetes / OpenShift

Agentic AI / ADK

Distributed systems

Regulated environments

Communication with stakeholders

Tools

Kubernetes/OpenShift

PostgreSQL

Oracle

Jenkins

uDeploy

Tekton

Harness

MLflow

ADK

Job description

About the Team

The Enterprise AI Products team is a small, high-impact global team within the Citi COO/CTO organisation, dedicated to building innovative AI solutions for the wider bank.

We are at the forefront of Generative AI, delivering capabilities that enable safe and efficient use of Generative AI at scale. We create services, applications and libraries that power the use of Intelligent Document Processing to drive real-world business impact.

The Role

This is a senior role within a deliberately flat team structure. You will be expected to take ownership, bring fresh thinking, and collaborate closely with colleagues across disciplines to deliver outcomes that genuinely make a difference.

You will write bulletproof, production-grade code — not prototypes — to solve novel problems that sit at the frontier of applied Generative AI. Typical problem spaces you'll work on include intelligent data extraction from unstructured and semi-structured documents, content classification and routing, cross-language translation, fraud and document-tampering detection, and workflow optimisation across business processes. You'll be trusted to turn ambiguous, often first-of-a-kind problems into dependable services that the business can run its operations on. Because these solutions operate in a regulated banking environment, resilience, explainability, and auditability are as important as raw model performance — and you will move fluidly between experimentation, evaluating models, prompts, and architectures, and hardening the winning approach into dependable, scalable production code.

You will gain meaningful exposure to AI development and solutions, alongside a broad range of technical work in a fast-moving, delivery-focused environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and support high-quality, production-grade AI software and services that scale across the organisation.
• Own technical solutions end-to-end, from problem definition and experimentation through to deployment and ongoing improvement.
• Develop innovative Generative AI solutions for complex business problems, including intelligent document processing, data extraction, classification, translation, fraud detection and workflow optimisation.
• Evaluate and experiment with AI models, prompts and architectures, selecting and productionising the most effective approaches.
• Lead the technical design and architecture of AI products, ensuring solutions are resilient, scalable, explainable and auditable.
• Work closely with Product, Risk, Engineering and other AI platform teams to deliver solutions that meet business and regulatory requirements.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to shape product vision, technical strategy and roadmaps.
• Provide technical leadership, guidance and mentorship to other engineers, helping to raise engineering standards across the team.
• Drive strong engineering practices through technical design reviews, code reviews, automated testing and continuous improvement.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed systems and proactively identify opportunities to improve performance, reliability and scalability.
• Contribute to the evolution of Citi’s AI technology, engineering practices and procedures.

Key Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a Senior Software Engineer, AI Engineer, Technical Lead or similar senior engineering role.
• Strong hands‑on software engineering experience, with a track record of building and delivering production systems rather than prototypes.
• Strong Python development skills and experience building robust, maintainable applications and services.
• Practical experience applying Generative AI and Large Language Models to real-world business problems.
• Extensive experience designing and optimising prompts across different Generative AI models, with a rigorous approach to prompt structure, clarity and performance.
• Experience building production solutions in areas such as Intelligent Document Processing, document/data extraction, NLP‑based classification, machine translation, fraud/anomaly detection or workflow automation.
• Experience evaluating Generative AI applications, including experiment design, model evaluation and performance measurement; exposure to MLflow is advantageous.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, technical design and functional programming principles.
• Experience working with databases such as PostgreSQL or Oracle, with exposure to Kubernetes/OpenShift advantageous.
• Practical experience with CI/CD and modern software delivery tooling such as Jenkins, uDeploy, Tekton, Harness or equivalent.
• Exposure to Agentic AI and Agent Development Kit (ADK).
• Strong problem‑solving and analytical skills, with the ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems.
• Ability to work effectively in a highly regulated environment where resilience, explainability, security and auditability are critical.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the confidence to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels.
• A creative and adaptable mindset, with the ability to turn ambiguous, first‑of‑a‑kind problems into practical and dependable production solutions.

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

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.

Job Family Group: Technology

Job Family: Systems & Engineering

Time Type: Full time

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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