Forward Deployed Engineering Director

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 Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Director is a senior executive engineering leader responsible for building, directing, and scaling high-performing Forward Deployed Engineering squads embedded directly within Citi's Lines of Business. This role acts as the primary delivery partner to Line of Business Managing Directors and CIOs, translating mission-critical business challenges into production-ready, enterprise-grade AI agents while enforcing architectural rigor, evaluation standards, and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Portfolio & Squad Delivery Management: Direct resource allocation, technical solutioning, sprint roadmaps, and high-velocity delivery across 3–5 concurrent embedded FDE pods building high-impact AI agents.

• Field-to-Platform Flywheel: Champion the transformation of custom Line of Business agent workflows into reusable enterprise components, modular toolsets, and platform capabilities in collaboration with core platform teams.

• Discovery & Workflow Mapping: Partners directly with Line of Business Managing Directors and operational heads to conduct immersion workshops, uncover high-friction workflow bottlenecks, and scope high-value agentic transformation opportunities.

• Rapid Prototyping Governance: Establishes a rapid prototyping framework ('Concept-to-Working-Pilot in <2 Weeks') across embedded pods, balancing rapid iterative feedback loops with enterprise safety and production standards.

• People Leadership & Talent Development: Recruit, mentor, and lead an elite organization of 20+ Forward Deployed Engineers (C12–C14), cultivating a culture of high engineering rigor, customer empathy, rapid prototyping, and psychological safety.

• Enterprise Standards & Safety Enforcement: Ensure all agentic software built by embedded squads strictly adheres to enterprise architectural blueprints, automated evaluation gates, AI safety guardrails, and secure coding standards.

• Complex Systems Integration: Oversee the architectural design and implementation of high-throughput integrations connecting autonomous agents to core transactional banking engines, data lakes, and third-party APIs.

• 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, as well as effectively supervise the activity of others and create accountability with those who fail to maintain these standards.
  

Skills & Experience:

• Total Experience: 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience, with 6–8+ years leading engineering squads in Tier-1 banking, top-tier tech, high-growth AI scale-ups, or fintech.

• AI & Distributed Systems Knowledge: Strong technical fluency in modern AI paradigms (LLMs, multi-agent frameworks, vector search, RAG architectures, and Model Context Protocol) combined with deep distributed systems engineering expertise.

• Executive Stakeholder Management: Proven track record of managing high-stakes executive stakeholder relationships and deploying mission-critical software systems into heavily regulated production environments.

• Domain Breadth: Strong working knowledge of financial products, capital markets, transaction banking, wealth management, or enterprise risk operations.

• People Management: Proven track of record building and scaling teams from a handful of engineers to dozens.

• Proven track record of operating in high-touch, forward-deployed, or client-embedded engineering environments (e.g., tech consulting, forward-deployed AI, or embedded business delivery pods).

• Exceptional consultative problem-solving skills with demonstrated capability to lead high-ambiguity discovery sessions with non-technical business executives.

• Demonstrated ability to attract, recruit, develop, and retain elite senior engineering talent.
  

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. (opens in new window)

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

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Job Family:

Applications Development

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Time Type:

Full time

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Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

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Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi.

View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.