Lead / Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (SVP)
Citigroup · London
About the Team:
Build the next generation of agentic AI.
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 take ownership of the full engineering lifecycle, from agent architecture and orchestration to enterprise integration, security and observability.
With a strong focus on hands-on engineering, collaboration and rapid delivery, the Factory gives you the opportunity to solve challenging technical problems, influence architectural decisions and help shape reusable tools and engineering standards adopted 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.
About the Role:
The Lead / Staff Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior technical anchor embedded within Line of Business delivery pods. This role is responsible for driving technical discovery, architecting end-to-end agentic workflows for flagship business use cases, leading complex technical integrations with core banking backends, and mentoring engineers across the pod in software engineering excellence.
Responsibilities:
- Technical Anchor & Discovery: Serve as the senior technical authority embedded within Line of Business squads—partnering directly with business stakeholders and domain experts to translate complex, ambiguous operational workflows into robust technical architectures.
- Agentic Workflow Architecture: Architect, develop, and deploy production-grade agent reasoning loops and multi-agent workflows using Python, graph-based state engines (e.g., LangGraph), and enterprise agent orchestration runtimes.
- Rapid Prototyping & Iteration: Leads rapid end-to-end prototyping sprints (generating working conversational and multi-agent prototypes within days) to validate business feasibility, user trust, and interaction ergonomics before full production buildout.
- User Experience & Co-Design: Co-designs intuitive Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) review interfaces and feedback mechanisms with business users to ensure high user adoption, domain trust, and operational transparency.
- Custom Tool & Protocol Engineering: Lead the design and implementation of secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, OpenAPI bridges, and gRPC/REST connectors linking autonomous agents to sensitive core banking engines, databases, and microservices.
- Advanced RAG & Context Engineering: Architect enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including hybrid search (dense vector + sparse BM25), semantic caching, contextual chunking, re-ranking, and knowledge graph integrations.
- Enterprise Security & Isolation: Implement zero-trust security controls for agent execution, including mutual TLS (mTLS), OAuth2/OIDC token delegation, enterprise secret management vaults, and sandboxed container execution environments.
- Code Quality & Technical Mentorship: Set coding standards, conduct rigorous code and architecture reviews, and actively mentor Senior (C13) and Junior/Mid (C12) engineers within the squad.
- Evaluation & Guardrail Integration: Collaborate with the Principal Architect and FDE team to integrate automated evaluation testbeds (measuring task completion, tool call correctness, latency, and hallucinations) and enterprise safety guardrails into deployment pipelines.
- Platform Contribution: Identify common field patterns and extract reusable agent modules, prompt templates, and integration harnesses for contribution back into core enterprise platforms.
- 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.
Qualifications:
- Total Experience: 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 6+ years specializing in backend/distributed systems.
- Hands-On AI Experience: 2+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying production LLM-powered applications, with proven implementation experience in modern agentic frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, ADK) or custom state-machine reasoning engines.
- Core Technical Stack: Mastery of Python, Java, or Go, asynchronous programming (asyncio), state machines, container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes/OpenShift), relational/NoSQL databases, and event streaming (Kafka).
- Enterprise Integration & Security: Proven experience integrating enterprise APIs, building secure tool-calling environments, and applying zero-trust identity delegation patterns.
- Demonstrated experience in forward-deployed, customer-facing, or embedded engineering roles, with a proven ability to translate ambiguous business problems into functional software prototypes.
- Strong leadership and mentoring capabilities, with excellent communication and stakeholder collaboration skills.
Education:
Bachelor’s/University degree or equivalent experience; Master’s degree preferred
What we’ll provide you
This is a unique role that will put you in the position to be part of a new venture and actively drive change. Every day there will be new challenges that will help you develop new skills that can drive your career.
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
Visit our Global Benefits page to learn more.
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.
#LI-AH4
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Job Family Group:
Technology------------------------------------------------------
Job Family:
Applications Development------------------------------------------------------
Time Type:
Full time------------------------------------------------------
Most Relevant Skills
Please see the requirements listed above.------------------------------------------------------
Other Relevant Skills
For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.------------------------------------------------------
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