Forward Deployed Engineer - Vice President

Citigroup Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 161,000 - 241,000; 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

Citigroup Inc. is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with Line of Business squads. You will write production-grade Python, build MCP servers and API connectors, and develop end-to-end AI agent workflows within Citi's enterprise safety standards.

You will collaborate with traders, bankers, and analysts, delivering rapid prototypes, resilient data pipelines, and compliant, audited solutions in a hybrid work model.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Python/Java/Go in production-grade systems.
• Experience with enterprise AI gateways and LLM integration.
• Familiarity with data pipelines, vector stores, and retrieval.
• Ability to collaborate with traders, bankers, and analysts.
• 7+ years software engineering experience with strong backend skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop production-grade agent reasoning logic and tool integrations.
• Build MCP servers and API connectors to enterprise systems.
• Create RAG data ingestion, embedding generation, and semantic search.
• Implement resilient error handling, retries, and HITL escalation.
• Develop deterministic validation with Pydantic and JSON Schema.
• Integrate AI guardrails for prompt safety and PII redaction.
• Collaborate with LB/line-of-business teams in agile sprints.
• Prototype and refine agent workflows based on pilot feedback.

Skills

LLM & AI Engineering

Software Engineering Fundamentals

Prompt & Data Engineering

Stakeholder collaboration

Python/Java/Go proficiency

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Master's degree preferred

Tools

Docker

Git

Linux

REST/gRPC APIs

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

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.

• 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 (e.g., 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.

• LLM & AI Engineering: 1-2+ years of hands-on experience working with foundation model APIs (e.g., 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.
• Total Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 4+ years of strong, professional Python, Java, or Go proficiency.

Education

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

Working at Citi is far more than just a job. A career with us means joining a team of approximately 219,000 dedicated people from around the globe. At Citi, you'll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community and make a real impact., 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.

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.

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