AI Strategic Partnerships Lead, SVP
Citigroup· startup· Banking· Oct 13, 2026 · 15d ago
Jersey City, NJ
In office
Full-time
Lead
$177K–$265K
10+ years exp
Job description
About Citi:
Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.
As a bank with a brain and a soul, Citi creates economic value that is systemically responsible and in our clients’ best interests. As a financial institution that touches every region of the world and every sector that shapes your daily life, our Operations & Technology teams are charged with a mission that rivals any large tech company. Our technology solutions are the foundations of everything we do from keeping the bank safe, managing global resources, and providing the technical tools our workers need to be successful to designing our digital architecture and ensuring our platforms provide a first-class customer experience. We reimagine client and partner experiences to deliver excellence through secure, reliable, and efficient services.
Our commitment to diversity includes a workforce that represents the clients we serve from all walks of life, backgrounds, and origins. We foster an environment where the best people want to work. We value and demand respect for others, promote individuals based on merit, and ensure opportunities for personal development are widely available to all. Ideal candidates are innovators with well-rounded backgrounds who bring their authentic selves to work and complement our culture of delivering results with pride. If you are a problem solver who seeks passion in your work, come join us. We’ll enable growth and progress together.
The Role:
The AI Strategic Partnerships Lead sits within Citi s Head of AI Organization and serves as a dynamic business leader and execution-driven orchestrator for external AI technology partnerships. This SVP-level leader is accountable for executing on Citi s enterprise AI strategy by actively scouting, rigorously evaluating, and driving external AI technologies across the full partnership lifecycle — from initial ecosystem discovery and PoC validation to compliant, enterprise-scale production rollout.
This role combines strong commercial and investment acumen with either AI product management discipline or Generative AI engineering fluency . The ideal candidate operates as a proactive business leader who understands the venture capital and startup landscape, navigates complex enterprise environments, and collaborates hand-in-hand with dedicated Project Managers to move partner technologies through rigorous technical, operational, and governance milestones into business unit adoption.
Unlike pure corporate development or research roles, this position is focused on operationalizing high-value AI solutions across Citi s global business lines. The leader bridges external innovation (startups, frontier labs, VCs, accelerators) with internal delivery teams, ensuring that every partnership addresses validated Business Unit needs, meets strict regulatory and risk standards, and delivers measurable enterprise ROI.
Responsibilities
Strategic Partnerships Engagement & Lifecycle Management
Ecosystem Scouting & Assessment: Proactively scout and evaluate emerging AI startups, foundation model providers, agentic platform vendors, RAG/data infrastructure providers, and specialized tooling to identify high-potential solutions that address Citi s business challenges.
Full Partnership Lifecycle Ownership: Manage the end-to-end partnership lifecycle — encompassing initial market mapping, technology and commercial assessment, investment/licensing awareness, contractual alignment, sandbox onboarding, and long-term vendor relationship management.
Venture & Startup Ecosystem Engagement: Leverage strong knowledge of the venture capital, accelerator, and startup investment landscape to gauge company maturity, financial viability, product velocity, and enterprise readiness.
Strategy Execution & PoC-to-Production Delivery
Execution on AI Strategy: Translate Citi’s overarching AI strategic priorities into structured, time-bound execution plans, ensuring vendor initiatives directly advance target business outcomes.
PoC Leadership & Sandbox Testing: Design, oversee, and run structured sandbox evaluations, proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and objective competitive bake-offs with clearly defined performance, latency, cost, and security benchmarks.
Rollout to Production: Collaborate closely with Project Managers, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to shepherd validated partner technologies from successful PoC completion through full deployment and operationalization in production environments.
Technical & Product Fluency: Apply deep AI product management principles or Gen AI engineering fluency (understanding LLM architectures, context management, prompt/agent orchestration, vector stores, and synthetic data) to direct technical teams, validate architecture assumptions, and stress-test vendor capabilities.
Business Leadership & Enterprise Stakeholder Integration
Business Unit Relationship Leadership: Act as the primary engagement partner for Business Unit leadership, understanding their operational workflows, pain points, and commercial targets to align the right partner solutions to real business demand.
Cross-Functional Governance & TPRM Navigation: Serve as the chief facilitator across Risk, Compliance, Information Security, Model Risk Management (MRM), Legal, and Procurement to guide startup partners through Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) and onboarding requirements.
Executive Communication & Business Cases: Develop clear, non-technical business cases, executive briefings, and ROI models for senior leadership, articulating the business value, trade-offs, and scaling pathway for each partnership.
Qualifications
10 years experience in technology strategic partnerships, AI product management, or technology delivery within top-tier financial institutions, or prior experience in corporate venture capital, innovation labs, accelerators, or high-growth AI startups.
Demonstrated expertise executing partnership lifecycles , including scouting, technical evaluations, commercial structuring, PoC execution, and scaling third-party software into enterprise production.
Technical or Product Fluency in Gen AI: Strong background in either AI Product Management or Generative AI Engineering , with working knowledge of LLMs (proprietary and open-weight), RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, fine-tuning, and model evaluation metrics.
Communication & Executive Presence: Exceptional ability to synthesize complex technical, commercial, and operational findings into actionable executive recommendations.
Education
Bachelor’s degree/University degree or equivalent experience
Master’s degree preferred
This job description provides a high-level review of the types of work performed. Other job-related duties may be assigned as required.
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Job Family Group: Technology ------------------------------------------------------
Job Family: Infrastructure ------------------------------------------------------
Time Type: Full time ------------------------------------------------------
Primary Location: Jersey City New Jersey United States ------------------------------------------------------
Primary Location Full Time Salary Range: $176,720.00 - $265,080.00
In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards. Citi offers competitive employee benefits, including: medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs. Citi also offers paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays. For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.
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Most Relevant Skills Please see the requirements listed above. ------------------------------------------------------
Other Relevant Skills For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter. ------------------------------------------------------
Anticipated Posting Close Date: Oct 20, 2026 ------------------------------------------------------
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.
Illinois residents – AI Notice and Right
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Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.
If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi .
View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.
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