Principal AI Architect - Director

Description

The Applied AI and Agents Factory is a group of engineers who turn advanced AI into production-ready solutions. You will work with business and technology teams on hard engineering problems, build intelligent agents, and move ideas from first concept to live deployment.

The work goes past chat tools. You will design systems that reason, plan and carry out multi-step workflows, owning the whole engineering lifecycle from agent architecture and orchestration through enterprise integration, security and observability.

The Factory is hands-on and focused on fast delivery. You will solve difficult technical problems, shape architectural decisions, and help build reusable tools and engineering standards used across the company.

This senior executive role is the top technical authority for autonomous agentic systems and multi-agent frameworks across Citigroup. The holder sets and governs the enterprise architecture for these systems, co-owns enterprise blueprints, review gates and playbooks, and bridges field implementations with core internal platforms: Arc Platform, R2D2 Gateway, Agentflow and Helix.

Responsibilities

• Act as chief technical authority for autonomous systems, multi-agent frameworks and hierarchical sub-agent designs across the company's global technology footprint.
• Write and maintain enterprise reference architectures and blueprints for single-agent, hierarchical sub-agent and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) workflows, and make sure every delivery pod follows them strictly.
• Serve as the main technical link in the Product/Platform Feedback Loop with the Arc Core, R2D2 Gateway and Agentflow platform teams, turning friction seen in line-of-business deployments into core platform features.
• Chair the Agent Architecture Review Board (AARB), which runs the mandatory technical, architectural and security reviews for all high-risk AI agents before UAT and before production promotion.
• Set enterprise standards for Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration, zero-trust boundary enforcement through Tiramisu proxies, and COIN M2M identity token delegation.
• Set horizontal standards for governance, code quality, testability and automated evaluation across all Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) pods.
• Advise senior business and technology leaders on emerging AI paradigms, validation of non-deterministic systems, and foundation model capabilities.
• Assess risk when business decisions are made, with close attention to the firm's reputation and to protecting Citigroup, its clients and its assets. Drive compliance with applicable laws, rules, regulations and Policy, use sound ethical judgment in personal and business conduct, escalate and report control issues openly, and supervise others, holding to account anyone who fails to meet these standards.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressively senior software architecture and engineering work in enterprise, distributed systems or financial technology.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and deploying production LLM-powered applications, multi-agent systems and autonomous agentic workflows, using tools such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel or Agent Development Kit (ADK).
• Expert-level Python and/or Golang, plus OpenShift/Kubernetes, distributed microservices, OAuth2/JWT token delegation, API gateway management and enterprise telemetry (OpenTelemetry, Splunk).
• Deep knowledge of financial services compliance, Model Risk Management (MRM) standards, and deterministic validation methods for non-deterministic AI outputs.
• A record of leading technical governance bodies and shaping enterprise-level architecture.
• Clear, concise and persuasive writing and speaking at executive level.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience required.
• A Master's degree in Computer Science, AI/ML or a related technical field is strongly preferred.

Conditions

Full-time position based in New York, New York, United States.

Base salary range is $170,000.00 to $300,000.00.

Eligible employees may also receive discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and reviews applications without regard to protected characteristics.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision coverage, a 401(k), life, accident and disability insurance, and wellness programs.
• Paid vacation, sick leave and holidays.
• Benefit offerings vary by jurisdiction, job level and hire date.