AI Partnerships Lead - Enterprise AI Vetting & Strategy

Citi; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 142,000 - 213,000; Full time

Job summary

Citi is seeking an AI Partnerships Lead (Technology Vendor & Start-up Evaluation) to drive enterprise-wide AI vendor onboarding and adoption. You will evaluate startups and partners, build PoCs, and coordinate risk and governance across Citi's global units.

Must have deep AI fluency, experience with fintech ecosystems, and strong executive communication to translate complex technical findings into strategic recommendations. This is a hybrid role based in Jersey City.

Qualifications

• At least 6 years experience delivering technology for top-tier banks or closely with partnerships, VC, accelerator, CTO office, or similar.
• Hands-on AI experience with LLMs, RAG, agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and synthetic data generation.
• Experience with AWS and GCP, including on-prem and hybrid deployment constraints.
• Ability to design rigorous, unbiased technical evaluation frameworks for enterprise decisions.
• Excellent executive communication and storytelling for senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Scout global AI, fintech, and enterprise software ecosystems to surface technologies aligned with Citi's AI priorities.
• Prototype synthetic data and frontier techniques to unlock regulated use cases.
• Design isolated sandbox environments for hands-on vendor evaluations in enterprise settings.
• Lead objective bakeoffs, define evaluation criteria, and benchmark performance, cost, security, and integration.
• Develop rapid PoCs to validate business use cases before full deployment.
• Coordinate with Risk, Procurement, Legal, IS, and MRM for onboarding AI vendors.
• Advise startups on adapting products to Citi's infrastructure and data governance requirements.
• Build relationships with AI labs, VCs, accelerators, cloud providers; represent Citi externally.
• Act as authority on modern AI stacks, evaluation methods, and emerging infra.
• Manage multiple evaluations and workstreams across a fast-moving portfolio.

Skills

AI fluency

Executive communication

Vendor evaluation

Cloud (AWS/GCP)

Regulated environments

Stakeholder management

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Master's degree preferred

Job description

Citi is seeking an AI Partnerships Lead (Technology Vendor & Start-up Evaluation) to drive enterprise-wide AI vendor onboarding and adoption. You will evaluate startups and partners, build PoCs, and coordinate risk and governance across Citi's global units.

Must have deep AI fluency, experience with fintech ecosystems, and strong executive communication to translate complex technical findings into strategic recommendations. This is a hybrid role based in Jersey City.