Senior AI Tooling & Security Architect

Citizens Bank; Raleigh (NC); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Citizens Bank seeks a Distinguished Engineer to lead AI tooling and security across the enterprise. You will design and secure AI platforms, mentor engineers, and shape engineering standards for scalable, secure AI at scale.

You will partner with architecture, security, data, and business teams to drive responsible AI adoption, establish governance, and advance secure AI capabilities while enabling innovation and growth.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, security engineering, or data engineering experience.
• Proven 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.

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.

Skills

Software engineering

Platform engineering

Security engineering

Data engineering

AI/ML concepts

Python

Other programming languages

AWS

Linux

Scripting (Bash)

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud security

Identity & access management

API security

Communication

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering/Data Science/Cybersecurity

Tools

AWS cloud technologies

CI/CD tools (Jenkins/CircleCI/GitHub Actions)

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Job description

Citizens Bank seeks a Distinguished Engineer to lead AI tooling and security across the enterprise. You will design and secure AI platforms, mentor engineers, and shape engineering standards for scalable, secure AI at scale.

You will partner with architecture, security, data, and business teams to drive responsible AI adoption, establish governance, and advance secure AI capabilities while enabling innovation and growth.