Citizens Financial Group, Inc. is hiring an AI Engineer

Citizens Financial Group, Inc. is looking for a Senior AI Software Engineer to lead the development of Agentic AI systems. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI, requiring end-to-end ownership from architecture to deployment and operational excellence.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement AI Agent architectures, including planner/executor patterns and multi-step reasoning flows.
• Build tooling and integrations for agents, such as APIs, internal services, and secure action execution with guardrails.
• Engineer agent behaviors for reliability, including deterministic fallbacks, bounded autonomy, and safe failure modes.
• Develop reusable agent frameworks and components like a shared tool registry, prompt contracts, and standardized observability.
• Enable teams to embed agents into products via SDKs, reference implementations, and well-defined APIs.
• Implement evaluation pipelines for agents covering task success rate, tool-call accuracy, and cost.
• Build production-grade RAG pipelines to ground agent outputs in authoritative enterprise knowledge.
• Implement agent memory patterns with strong privacy and retention controls.
• Apply prompt orchestration techniques to reliably guide agent behavior.
• Build and maintain production inference services optimized for performance, resiliency, and cost.
• Create CI/CD for agent services with automated tests, canary releases, and rollback strategies.
• Implement full observability, including distributed tracing for agent steps and model telemetry.
• Embed security-by-design into agent systems, covering secrets handling and audit logs.
• Implement policy and governance guardrails for agent autonomy, such as approval flows and PII redaction.
• Partner with Risk and Compliance teams to meet enterprise governance expectations.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers on agentic architecture and best practices.
• Collaborate with Product, Architecture, Security, and Data partners to translate business tasks into scalable workflows.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years building production software systems, with 3+ years delivering AI/ML or GenAI solutions to production.
• Strong proficiency in Python plus at least one backend language like Java, Go, or Node.js.
• Demonstrated experience building distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures in the cloud.
• Hands-on experience with LLM application development, including tool calling and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong engineering discipline in testing strategy, performance tuning, CI/CD, and incident response.

Nice to Have

• Proven experience building AI Agents and Agentic workflows with multi-step task execution.
• Experience implementing RAG for enterprise knowledge grounding and traceability.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes, and enterprise observability stacks.
• Experience in regulated environments like financial services, including SDLC controls and audit readiness.

Technical Stack

• Languages: Python, Java, Go, Node.js
• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes
• AI: LLM, RAG

Benefits & Compensation

• Compensation range: $107,360 - $161,000 per year.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• Flexible work arrangements.
• Education reimbursement.
• Wellness programs.
• Paid time off policy exceeding local and state mandates.

Work Mode

This is a hybrid position based in one of the following locations: Johnston RI, Iselin NJ, Westwood MA, Medford MA, or Phoenix AZ.

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws.