Senior Agentic AI Engineer

Description

4 Days in the office from any of our locations in Johnston RI,Iselin NJ, Westwood or Medford MA, or Phoenix AZ and couple other locations

Role is not relocation eligible. 

Senior AI Software Engineer (Agentic AI / AI Agents)

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on, results-driven Senior AI Software Engineer to build and scale Agentic AI capabilities—AI systems that can plan, act, and complete tasks through tool use and workflow orchestration—across enterprise platforms. This role is pivotal in delivering secure, reliable, and compliant AI Agents that integrate into customer and colleague journeys, accelerate time-to-market, and improve operational efficiency.

You will operate at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI, owning end-to-end delivery—from architecture and implementation to deployment, observability, and operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Build and Operate AI Agents (Agentic AI Engineering)

• Design and implement AI Agent architectures (planner/executor patterns, multi-step reasoning flows, tool-use orchestration) to execute business tasks end-to-end.

• Build tooling and integrations for agents (APIs, internal services, data tools, workflow engines), including secure action execution, approvals, and guardrails.

• Engineer agent behaviors for reliability: deterministic fallbacks, bounded autonomy, retries, idempotency, and safe failure modes for partial completion.

Agent Platforms, Reuse, and Scale

• Develop reusable agent frameworks and components: shared tool registry, prompt/tool contracts, agent memory strategies, policy enforcement, and standardized observability.

• Enable teams to embed agents into multiple products/channels via SDKs, reference implementations, and well-defined APIs, reducing duplication and improving consistency.

• Implement evaluation pipelines for agents: task success rate, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, latency/cost, and regression testing across agent versions.

• Build production-grade RAG pipelines and grounding mechanisms to ensure agent outputs are traceable and based on authoritative enterprise knowledge sources.

• Implement agent memory patterns (session memory, long-term memory, semantic caches) with strong privacy and retention controls.

• Apply prompt orchestration techniques (system policies, role prompts, tool prompts) to reliably guide agent behavior.

Production Engineering & LLMOps

• Build and maintain production inference services optimized for performance, resiliency, and cost (caching, batching, async execution, circuit breakers).

• Create CI/CD for agent services: automated tests, canary releases, rollback strategies, and safe progressive delivery.

• Implement full observability: distributed tracing for agent steps and tool calls, model/token telemetry, failure analytics, and incident runbooks.

Security, Privacy, and Responsible AI (Non-Negotiable)

• Embed security-by-design into agent systems: secrets handling, least-privilege tool access, encryption, audit logs, and tamper-resistant action trails.

• Implement policy and governance guardrails for agent autonomy: approval flows, restricted actions, PII redaction, and prompt injection defenses.

• Partner with Risk/Compliance to ensure solutions meet enterprise governance expectations.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers on agentic architecture, production readiness, and engineering best practices.

• Collaborate with Product, Architecture, Security, and Data partners to translate business tasks into scalable agent workflows and services.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• 7+ years building production software systems; 3+ years delivering AI/ML or GenAI solutions to production.

• Strong proficiency in Python plus at least one backend language (Java/Go/Node.js).

• Demonstrated experience building distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures in cloud environments.

• Hands-on experience with LLM application development (tool calling/function calling, orchestration frameworks, evaluation).

• Strong engineering discipline: testing strategy, performance tuning, CI/CD, reliability, and on-call/incident response.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience building AI Agents / Agentic workflows (multi-step task execution, tool integration, planning/execution separation).

• Experience implementing RAG for enterprise knowledge grounding and traceability.

• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes) and enterprise observability stacks.

• Experience in regulated environments (financial services), including SDLC controls, privacy constraints, and audit readiness.

What Success Looks Like

• AI Agents reliably complete high-value tasks end-to-end with measurable improvements in cycle time, quality, and customer/colleague experience.

• Agent behaviors are safe and governed: clear audit trails, strong access controls, predictable failure modes, and strong monitoring.

• Agent components are reusable across teams, accelerating adoption while reducing duplicated effort and operational risk.

Pay Transparency 

The salary range for this position is $ 107,360 - $ 161,000 per yearplus an opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. Actual pay is based on various factors including but not limited to the work location, and relevant skills and experience.   

We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more. Note, Citizens’ paid time off policy exceeds the mandatory, paid sick or paid time-away policy of very local and state jurisdiction in the United States. For an overview of our benefits, visit https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits.

Some job boards have started using jobseeker-reported data to estimate salary ranges for roles. If you apply and qualify for this role, a recruiter will discuss accurate pay guidance.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) 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. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.