Distinguished Engineer - AI Security

Citizens Bank; Johnston (RI); On-site; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Citizens Bank in Johnston, RI, seeks a Distinguished Engineer to lead the design, tooling, and security of AI platforms across the enterprise. This role blends advanced software engineering with security leadership to ensure scalable, secure AI outcomes and responsible innovation.

You will mentor engineers, drive engineering standards, and partner with security, data, and business teams to advance AI capabilities while aligning with risk controls and regulatory expectations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software/engineering/security/data experience.
• Proven leadership across large-scale initiatives.
• Strong understanding of AI/ML architectures and secure deployment.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and security of AI powered platforms.
• Collaborate with engineering and security teams to define scalable solutions.
• Build cloud-native applications and reusable components.
• Incorporate reliability, observability, and security into systems.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering excellence.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud (AWS)

Security engineering

Python

CI/CD

Leadership

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER, AI TOOLING & SECURITY

Why This Role Matters

This role will help define and secure the future of AI at Citizens. The Distinguished Engineer, AI Tooling & Security will shape enterprise engineering practices, accelerate responsible AI adoption, and ensure that AI driven capabilities are developed, deployed, and operated securely at scale while enabling innovation and business growth.

Role Summary

Citizens is seeking a highly accomplished Distinguished Engineer, AI Tooling & Security to drive the design, engineering, and security of AI powered platforms and applications across the enterprise. This role combines deep software engineering expertise with advanced security knowledge to ensure AI solutions are scalable, resilient, secure, and aligned with business objectives.

As a Distinguished Engineer, you will serve as a hands on technical leader and peer mentor, partnering with engineering, architecture, security, data, and business teams to shape the future of AI adoption at Citizens. You will lead the development of innovative solutions, establish engineering standards, influence strategic technology decisions, and advance secure AI capabilities across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and implementation of innovative software solutions, platforms, and tools that support enterprise AI initiatives.
• Collaborate with engineering and architecture teams to define scalable, secure, and maintainable technology solutions aligned with enterprise standards.
• Build modern, cloud native applications and reusable components that accelerate business outcomes and technology innovation.
• Incorporate scalability, reliability, performance, observability, and maintainability into distributed systems and platform designs.
• Champion engineering excellence through code quality, automation, testing, and continuous improvement practices.
• Serve as a senior technical leader and mentor, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Build and operationalize security controls that protect AI applications, models, agents, prompts, and outputs from misuse and abuse.
• Secure the full AI and machine learning lifecycle, including data ingestion, model development, training, deployment, monitoring, and runtime operations.
• Design safeguards against emerging AI threats, including prompt injection, data poisoning, model inversion, adversarial attacks, and unauthorized data exposure.
• Strengthen identity, authentication, authorization, and access management controls for AI systems, APIs, services, and cloud environments.
• Secure integrations between AI platforms and enterprise applications, databases, APIs, and SaaS solutions to prevent unauthorized access and data exfiltration.
• Implement encryption, tokenization, data masking, and privacy preserving controls to protect sensitive information used by AI systems.
• Develop monitoring, logging, detection, and alerting capabilities to identify anomalous AI behaviors, policy violations, and security threats.
• Harden cloud platforms, containers, orchestration environments, and infrastructure supporting AI workloads.
• Evaluate security risks associated with third party AI platforms and services, ensuring appropriate governance and control frameworks.
• Integrate automated security validation, adversarial testing, and model robustness assessments into engineering and deployment pipelines.
• Lead technical investigations and response activities related to AI security incidents, model misuse, and data exposure events.
• Collaborate with architecture, governance, risk, compliance, and engineering teams to align AI security practices with regulatory requirements and business objectives.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, security engineering, or data engineering experience.
• Demonstrated success leading large scale engineering initiatives and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of AI, machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI architectures and implementation patterns.
• Experience developing secure, cloud based applications and services.
• Strong programming experience in Python and proficiency in at least one additional modern programming language.
• Experience working with large scale data platforms and analytical workloads.
• Hands on experience with AWS cloud technologies and securing sensitive workloads.
• Strong Linux and scripting experience, including Bash.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or similar technologies.
• Deep understanding of application security, cloud security, identity and access management, API security, and secure software development practices.
• Knowledge of AI security principles, model governance, threat modeling, and secure deployment patterns.
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.
• Proven ability to mentor and develop engineers while driving technical excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience securing enterprise AI, machine learning, or generative AI platforms.
• Experience within financial services, banking, fintech, or other highly regulated industries.
• Cloud certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, AWS Security Specialty, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent.
• Experience with container platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and platform engineering practices.
• Familiarity with emerging AI governance, model risk management, and regulatory frameworks.

Education

• Required: Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Preferred: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Cybersecurity, or a related technical discipline.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is $175,000 to $250,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn additional incentive earnings. Actual pay is based on various factors including, but not limited to, the budget, work location, and relevant skills and experience.

Benefits

Comprehensive benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, retirement plans, parental leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs, and generous paid time off exceeding local requirements.

Some job boards have started using jobseeker-reported data to estimate salary ranges for roles. If you apply and qualify for this role, a recruiter will discuss accurate pay guidance.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.