AI Strategic Partnerships Lead, SVP

Citigroup; Jersey City (NJ); On-site; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Citi seeks an AI Strategic Partnerships Lead (SVP) to drive external AI technology partnerships across the enterprise. You will scout, evaluate, and govern partnerships from discovery through production rollout, aligning with Citi's AI strategy and business units.

You combine commercial acumen with AI product or Gen AI engineering fluency, engaging startups, labs, and vendors while coordinating with project managers, architects, and security teams to ensure scalable, compliant deployments.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Partnerships Engagement & Lifecycle Management: oversee ecosystem scouting, assessment, and end-to-end partnership lifecycle.
• Ecosystem Scouting & Assessment: identify AI startups, foundation model providers, and tooling addressing Citi's challenges.
• Full Partnership Lifecycle Ownership: manage market mapping, technology and commercial assessment, licensing awareness, onboarding, and vendor management.
• Venture & Startup Ecosystem Engagement: evaluate maturity, financial viability, product velocity, and enterprise readiness.
• Strategy Execution & PoC-to-Production Delivery: translate priorities into execution plans and oversee PoC to production rollout.
• PoC Leadership & Sandbox Testing: design and run sandbox evaluations with defined performance and security benchmarks.
• Rollout to Production: work with engineers and architects to deploy partner tech in production.
• Technical & Product Fluency: apply AI product management or Gen AI engineering fluency.

Job description

About Citi:

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

As a bank with a brain and a soul, Citi creates economic value that is systemically responsible and in our clients' best interests. As a financial institution that touches every region of the world and every sector that shapes your daily life, our Operations & Technology teams are charged with a mission that rivals any large tech company. Our technology solutions are the foundations of everything we do from keeping the bank safe, managing global resources, and providing the technical tools our workers need to be successful to designing our digital architecture and ensuring our platforms provide a first-class customer experience. We reimagine client and partner experiences to deliver excellence through secure, reliable, and efficient services.

Our commitment to diversity includes a workforce that represents the clients we serve from all walks of life, backgrounds, and origins. We foster an environment where the best people want to work. We value and demand respect for others, promote individuals based on merit, and ensure opportunities for personal development are widely available to all. Ideal candidates are innovators with well-rounded backgrounds who bring their authentic selves to work and complement our culture of delivering results with pride. If you are a problem solver who seeks passion in your work, come join us. We'll enable growth and progress together.

The Role:

The AI Strategic Partnerships Lead sits within Citi's Head of AI Organization and serves as a dynamic business leader and execution-driven orchestrator for external AI technology partnerships. This SVP-level leader is accountable for executing on Citi's enterprise AI strategy by actively scouting, rigorously evaluating, and driving external AI technologies across the full partnership lifecycle - from initial ecosystem discovery and PoC validation to compliant, enterprise-scale production rollout.

This role combines strong commercial and investment acumen with either AI product management discipline or Generative AI engineering fluency. The ideal candidate operates as a proactive business leader who understands the venture capital and startup landscape, navigates complex enterprise environments, and collaborates hand-in-hand with dedicated Project Managers to move partner technologies through rigorous technical, operational, and governance milestones into business unit adoption.

Unlike pure corporate development or research roles, this position is focused on operationalizing high-value AI solutions across Citi's global business lines. The leader bridges external innovation (startups, frontier labs, VCs, accelerators) with internal delivery teams, ensuring that every partnership addresses validated Business Unit needs, meets strict regulatory and risk standards, and delivers measurable enterprise ROI.

Responsibilities

Strategic Partnerships Engagement & Lifecycle Management

Ecosystem Scouting & Assessment: Proactively scout and evaluate emerging AI startups, foundation model providers, agentic platform vendors, RAG/data infrastructure providers, and specialized tooling to identify high-potential solutions that address Citi's business challenges.

Full Partnership Lifecycle Ownership: Manage the end-to-end partnership lifecycle - encompassing initial market mapping, technology and commercial assessment, investment/licensing awareness, contractual alignment, sandbox onboarding, and long-term vendor relationship management.

Venture & Startup Ecosystem Engagement: Leverage strong knowledge of the venture capital, accelerator, and startup investment landscape to gauge company maturity, financial viability, product velocity, and enterprise readiness.

Strategy Execution & PoC-to-Production Delivery

Execution on AI Strategy: Translate Citi's overarching AI strategic priorities into structured, time-bound execution plans, ensuring vendor initiatives directly advance target business outcomes.

PoC Leadership & Sandbox Testing: Design, oversee, and run structured sandbox evaluations, proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and objective competitive bake-offs with clearly defined performance, latency, cost, and security benchmarks.

Rollout to Production: Collaborate closely with Project Managers, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to shepherd validated partner technologies from successful PoC completion through full deployment and operationalization in production environments.

Technical & Product Fluency: Apply deep AI product management principles or Gen AI engineering fluency (understanding LLM architectures, context management, prompt/ag