Lead Application Development Engineer, Generative AI Products - Senior Vice President

Location: Pune, Maharashtra, India

Employment Type: Regular

The Opportunity

This is your chance to build the foundational systems for 'Citi Assist', a Generative AI assistant that will reach every Citi employee globally. You'll join us on the ground floor, shaping a high-visibility platform and helping to define the standards for how a global bank adopts this technology safely and at scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll spend your time equally between writing code, architecting systems, and shaping both the technical and non-technical direction of our team and product. We're looking for someone who leads from the front, setting the standard through their own work while elevating everyone around them.

What You'll Do

Lead, code, and deliver. You'll act as the technical anchor for our backend services, but this isn't a hands-off role. You'll lead the design and development of robust, scalable systems, contribute high-quality code regularly, and set the standard for the rest of the team through your own work.

Own critical systems. You'll take ownership of core platform capabilities like the services that run our background jobs and autonomous agents. Your focus will be on building for reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

Shape our technical direction. You'll be a key voice in our technical decisions, helping to define our architecture and technical roadmap. You'll partner with the product owner and scrum master to plan our work, ensuring we're building the right things in the right way.

Champion safety and security. Building safe, sound, and compliant systems is non-negotiable. You'll lead by example, thinking about everything from technical security to the emerging challenges of AI safety.

Be a force multiplier. You'll make the entire team better through thoughtful guidance, constructive code reviews, and by unblocking others when they're stuck. Your success is measured by the success and growth of your team.

Communicate with purpose. You'll foster a culture of clear, direct, and proactive communication. In a distributed team, this is essential. You'll model this behaviour, ensuring information about progress, blockers, and decisions flows freely.

What We're Looking For

You should have

• Proven experience leading technical projects and mentoring other engineers
• Deep, hands-on experience building, deploying, and maintaining production-grade backend services. You're still writing code regularly and you're good at it.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Java, Go, or TypeScript/Node.js) with a willingness to work across our stack as needed
• Experience architecting and designing scalable, distributed systems
• A firm grasp of software design patterns and a commitment to writing clean, testable, and maintainable code
• Strong experience with containerised environments (we use OpenShift, but Kubernetes experience transfers well)
• Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines and a belief in automating things
• Solid experience working with relational databases like Postgres

What matters most to us

A hands-on technical leader. You believe that the best way to lead is by doing. You're equally comfortable in architecture discussions and pull requests. You don't just tell people what to build, you show them how.

A pragmatic builder. You take pride in your craft and build software that lasts. You know how to lead a team to make the right trade-offs between speed and long-term quality.

A bias for action and a focus on shipping. You understand our goal is to deliver value to users, not to chase perfection. You know when to move fast and when to invest in doing things properly.

A solutions-first mindset. You find the best path to solve the problem, whether that's writing new code, improving an old system, or integrating the right tool. The outcome is what matters.

Strong communication and influence. You can articulate your technical vision and bring others along with you. You're comfortable having difficult conversations and making tough calls when needed.

A collaborative spirit. You thrive in team environments where you can learn from others and help them grow. You see mentoring and knowledge-sharing as a core part of your role.

Bonus points for

• Strong Python experience (this is our primary backend language)
• Experience with other languages like TypeScript, Go, or Java
• Direct experience with Generative AI concepts, LLMs, or related projects
• Experience with data pipelines and ETL tools like Apache Airflow or Dagster
• Experience working in highly regulated environments

Our Tech Stack

We work primarily with Python on the backend, though we also use TypeScript, Go, and Java in places. Our frontend is built with TypeScript, React, and Next.js. We use Postgres for our database, run everything on Kubernetes (specifically Red Hat OpenShift), and our DevOps setup includes GitHub and CI/CD tools like Tekton and Harness.

Our Team and Mission

We're the Common Platform Engineering team for GenAI, a central group in the Chief Technology Office. We're a focused agile team that owns our work from idea to production.

Our culture is built on a shared belief in engineering craftsmanship, backed by leadership that actually understands what that means. We're on a journey to prove what's possible inside a large organisation, and that means navigating some legacy while building the future. This isn't a role for someone who wants everything to be perfect on day one. It's for a leader who wants to help us get there, influencing how we solve problems and raising our collective bar.

We have a dual mission. First, we're building 'Citi Assist', the GenAI digital assistant for our colleagues. Second, we're providing the platforms and guidance that enable the entire organisation to adopt GenAI safely and effectively.

This is not a typical banking job. You'll build foundational technology that has a direct, positive impact on hundreds of thousands of people. You'll have the executive support to tackle big problems and real autonomy to shape our solutions. Most importantly, you'll join a passionate, collaborative team where we all learn from each other and push each other to do our best work.

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