Senior AI Security Engineer

Engineer the future of global finance. At Citi, our Tech team doesn’t just support finance – we are helping to redefine it. Every day, $5 trillion crosses through our network. We do business in 180+ countries operating at a scale few can match. From deploying advanced AI to helping shape global markets, we build systems that matter. Look to join a team where your work helps influence economies, your ideas can drive innovation and outcomes, and your growth is backed by mentorship, continuous learning and flexibility with potential hybrid work opportunities. Help solve real-world challenges that touch millions and get the opportunity to build the future of finance with Citi Tech.

The Senior AI Security Engineer is a technical leader and engineering manager within CISO's AI security incubation function, enabling teams to move from ideation to working proof-of-concept and through to production-ready use cases. This role combines hands-on technical contribution with people management — owning the Incubator Environment that accelerates how cybersecurity teams discover, prototype, and validate AI-powered solutions, while leading and developing the engineering team that makes it happen.

This is a hands-on leadership role. The Senior AI Security Engineer architects agentic solutions, writes and reviews code, manages and develops engineers, and enables CISO teams to rapidly prove out new AI use cases. The team is building increasingly autonomous AI agents that perform complex cybersecurity tasks — from automated threat analysis and security control validation to intelligent triage and response orchestration. The successful candidate will drive this shift from prompt-based workflows to fully agentic AI systems, and will leverage AI development tools (Devin, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to achieve significant engineering productivity gains.

Key Responsibilities:

Agentic AI Engineering & Use Case Incubation (40%)

• Own and evolve the Incubator Environment — the platform and tooling that enables CISO teams to move from idea to working PoC to validated use case
• Partner with cybersecurity domain teams to understand their challenges, identify high-value AI use cases, and rapidly prototype agentic solutions
• Design, build, and deploy agentic AI systems that autonomously perform cybersecurity tasks — including threat analysis, security control validation, intelligent triage, and response orchestration
• Architect multi-agent orchestration systems, defining how AI agents collaborate, delegate, and escalate across security workflows
• Implement robust agent infrastructure: tool use frameworks, memory and context management, planning/execution loops, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Build and maintain RAG pipelines, knowledge retrieval systems, and dynamic context assembly that underpin agent decision-making
• Shepherd validated use cases through to production readiness and handoff to the dedicated product support team
• Drive adoption and effective use of AI development tooling (Devin, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to maximize team velocity
• Make key technical decisions on architecture, technology selection, and build-vs-integrate trade-offs

Incubator Platform & Technical Architecture (25%)

• Design and maintain the Incubator Environment architecture — a scalable, secure platform that enables rapid prototyping and validation of agentic AI use cases
• Build reusable components, templates, and patterns that lower the barrier for new use case development across CISO domains
• Define integration patterns between AI agents and existing CISO systems (SOC platforms, vulnerability management, threat intelligence tools, SOAR)
• Establish observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for agentic systems — including agent trace logging, decision auditing, and performance benchmarking
• Design safety and containment architectures for autonomous agents: sandboxing, permission boundaries, output validation, and escalation triggers
• Set engineering standards, define development practices, and establish quality gates that ensure PoCs are built to a standard that supports production handoff

People Leadership & Team Development (20%)

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of engineers, including performance management, objective setting, and career development
• Lead hiring and technical evaluation for new team members
• Build a high-performing engineering culture that balances speed with quality
• Mentor and coach engineers on agentic AI technologies, secure development practices, and engineering excellence
• Provide technical guidance through code reviews, architecture decisions, and pair programming on complex features
• Shape the "human + AI" operating model — designing how engineers work alongside AI development tools for maximum output

Stakeholder Engagement & Communication (15%)

• Act as a senior engineering voice to the Head of GenAI Security and wider stakeholders
• Present use case demos, technical strategy, and incubation outcomes at executive level
• Partner with AI Architecture & Advisory team, Cybersecurity Technology, and the dedicated product support team on cross-functional initiatives
• Translate complex AI/security engineering concepts into business language for senior leadership
• Collaborate with CISO domain teams to identify use case opportunities and communicate what's possible with agentic AI

Required Qualifications:

Technical Expertise

• 8-10+ years of experience in software engineering, with demonstrable experience as a technical lead or engineering manager
• Python mastery: Deep, hands-on experience building and maintaining production-grade Python applications and services
• LLM engineering: Practical experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), prompt engineering, model evaluation, and input/output guardrails
• Production systems: Track record of deploying and operating AI/ML systems in production at enterprise scale
• Software engineering fundamentals: Clean code, design patterns, testable architecture, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code

Strongly Preferred Technical Skills

• Agentic AI systems: Experience designing and building autonomous AI agents — including multi-agent orchestration, tool use frameworks, planning/execution loops, memory management, and human-in-the-loop patterns
• RAG and knowledge systems: Design and implementation of retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, vector databases, embedding models, and dynamic context assembly for agent decision-making
• AI safety and containment: Understanding of how to build guardrails, permission boundaries, and safety controls for autonomous AI systems operating in sensitive environments

Leadership & People Management

• 3+ years leading or managing engineering teams, including performance management, hiring, and career development
• Track record of delivering complex software products in environments where priorities shift rapidly
• Experience setting engineering standards and driving quality across a team's output
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers through code review, architectural guidance, and knowledge sharing
• Proven capability to attract, develop, and retain engineering talent

Domain Knowledge

• Cybersecurity understanding: Familiarity with SOC operations, threat detection, vulnerability management, or incident response — sufficient to build effective security tools
• Regulated environment experience: Understanding of working within governance, compliance, and risk management frameworks (financial services preferred but not essential)
• Enterprise software delivery: Experience building products that serve hundreds or thousands of users within large organizations

Preferred Qualifications:

Advanced Technical Skills

• AI red teaming: Experience with adversarial attacks on LLMs and agentic systems, prompt injection defense, agent manipulation, output filtering
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): Experience building or integrating MCP servers, tool registries, and resource providers for agentic systems
• Agent frameworks: Hands-on experience with frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK, or custom agent architectures
• Cloud-native architecture: Kubernetes/OpenShift, containerized deployments, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Observability for agentic systems: Agent trace logging, decision audit trails, performance benchmarking, LLM evaluation frameworks

Industry & Background

• Financial services experience: Previous role at a major bank, fintech, or financial technology vendor
• AI development tools: Experience using AI-assisted development tools (Devin, Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate engineering output
• Open-source contributions: Active participation in relevant AI/ML or security communities
• Certifications: CISSP, AWS/Azure Solutions Architect, or relevant AI/ML certifications from major cloud providers

Ideal Candidate Profile:

We are looking for a hands-on engineering leader — someone who can architect an agentic security workflow in the morning, coach an engineer through a tricky integration over lunch, and present a technical roadmap to senior leadership in the afternoon. The ideal candidate:

• Ships fast: Measures success by use cases validated and moved to production, not by documents written or meetings attended
• Thinks in agents: Naturally designs solutions as autonomous systems with tools, memory, and decision-making capabilities — not just prompt-in, text-out workflows
• Builds teams: Develops engineers, creates a high-performing culture, and attracts talent that wants to work on hard problems
• Thinks in systems: Sees the full picture — from agent orchestration to user experience to production monitoring — and designs accordingly
• Embraces AI-augmented development: Actively uses AI tools to multiply personal and team output, and is excited about pushing the boundaries of human + AI engineering
• Operates with autonomy: Does not wait to be told what to do — identifies the path forward and drives to completion
• Communicates clearly: Translates complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders without jargon

Why This Role Matters:

The Senior AI Security Engineer is a keystone hire for scaling CISO's AI security engineering capability. This role:

• Accelerates innovation: Enables CISO teams to rapidly move from "what if we could..." to working prototypes that prove value
• Elevates the team: Raises the technical bar across the engineering function
• Bridges the gap: Connects domain expertise in cybersecurity teams with agentic AI engineering capability, turning ideas into reality
• Pioneers agentic security: Drives the transition from prompt-based workflows to autonomous AI agents that transform how cybersecurity operates at enterprise scale

This is a rare opportunity to join an established AI security team at a pivotal moment, enabling cybersecurity professionals to harness agentic AI — threat analysis, control validation, intelligent triage, and response orchestration — at one of the world's largest financial institutions.

Working Environment:

• Growing team: Opportunity to shape engineering culture, practices, and standards as the team scales
• High autonomy: Significant freedom to make technical decisions and influence team direction
• AI-native development: Daily use of AI development tools as core engineering practice
• Fast-paced: Dynamic environment with evolving requirements and rapidly advancing AI technology
• Direct impact: Clear line of sight from engineering work to use cases adopted by security professionals across the organization

What we can offer you:

By joining Citi Hungary, 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 compensation package and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits that support you (and your family) to be well, live well and save well:

• Cafeteria Program
• Home Office Allowance (for colleagues working in hybrid work models)
• Paid Parental Leave Program (maternity and paternity leave)
• Private Medical Care Program and onsite medical rooms at our offices
• Pension Plan Contribution to voluntary pension fund
• Group Life Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Access to a wide variety of learning and development programs, online course libraries and upskilling platforms, such as Udemy and Degreed
• Flexible work arrangements to support you in managing work - life balance
• Career progression opportunities across geographies and business lines
• Socially active employee communities with diverse networking opportunities

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. 

Sounds like Citi has everything you need?

Then apply to discover the true extent of your capabilities. 

#LI-AE1

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Job Family Group:

Technology

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Job Family:

Systems & Engineering

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Time Type:

Full time

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Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:

22 713 830,00 Ft - 38 083 370,00 Ft

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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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Automated Processing and AI

We use automated processing, including artificial intelligence, for our legitimate business interests (or our reasonable and appropriate business purposes) to identify and align the candidate's skills and abilities with a specific job opening. Additionally, if you so choose, or consent, we can match your skills and abilities to other suitable roles at Citi.

Importantly, all our hiring processes and decisions, including determining your suitability for a role, are conducted, checked, and decided by individuals. Our automated processing and AI do not involve relying on automatic or autonomous decision-making. Please refer to any Jurisdictional Considerations, with specific provisions for your country (where relevant) for further details.

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This job opening is for an existing job vacancy.

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