4 Days work from office from any of our locations in RI,  Iselin NJ, MA, or Phoenix AZ

Role is not relocation eligible. 

Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

Your role as Principal of Software Engineering is to work with engineering teams and architecture to produce high-quality technology solutions. You will be given the autonomy to lead, design, and develop innovative solutions to some of the biggest technical issues facing the banking industry. As Principal, you will serve as a peer-leader tasked with pursuing cutting-edge initiatives and solutions. The breadth of Citizens operations ensures a diversity of projects as the bank pivots towards innovation and customer experience. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer with expertise in building Generative AI (GenAI) solutions and designing Agentic experiences integrated into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The ideal candidate will develop intelligent agents and AI-driven workflows that enhance automation, decision-making, and developer productivity across engineering platforms.

The Principal Software Engineer will be responsible for:

• Participating in an environment rapidly transforming to the Agile methodology, adhering to best practices, and collaborating effectively with your teammates.
• Collaborating and contributing insight to solution design ideation, ensuring both the success of the product and adherence to enterprise architecture principles.
• Designing, modifying, developing, and implementing software solutions. Building modern, architecturally sound components, tools and applications to meet mission-driven strategic business goals.
• Infusing quality of service characteristics, such as scalability, manageability, and maintainability, into distributed service-based framework to create or expand business or technical capabilities.
• Employing industry best practices to evaluate, correct and prevent vulnerabilities during the software development process.
• Serving as a peer-leader, encouraging a culture of innovation and accountability while adhering to Agile best practices.
• Design and implement GenAI‑powered applications and agentic workflows embedded within SDLC tools and processes to enhance automation, decision‑making, and developer productivity.
• Build and integrate RAG (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation) pipelines for enterprise‑scale AI solutions, including document ingestion, embeddings, and contextual retrieval.
• Develop APIs, microservices, and integration layers that enable AI‑driven automation across engineering platforms and CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement vector database solutions (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus) for semantic search and knowledge retrieval; optimize embedding strategies and latency.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, security, and DevOps to embed AI capabilities into build/test/release workflows (e.g., gated PR checks, automated code reviews, test case generation).
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and responsible AI standards, including model evaluation, guardrails, and human‑in‑the‑loop review.
• Establish observability for AI systems (telemetry, tracing, evaluation harnesses) to measure accuracy, drift, latency, and cost; drive continuous improvement cycles.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands‑on software development, with proven experience in developing and supporting commercial software products sold to non‑technical customers in vertical markets.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor software engineers.
• 5+ years experience in querying, analyzing, and managing big data.
• Mastery of multiple programming languages, including at least one front‑end framework (Angular/React/Vue), such as Python3, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Golang, C, C++, etc.
• Cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP), including managing sensitive assets.
• Bash and Linux experience.
• CI/CD pipeline experience (CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent).
• Strong communication (both oral and written) and interpersonal skills.
• Cloud certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, AI/ML Certifications.
• Understand data structure concepts such as linked lists, dictionaries, arrays, custom object creation, etc.
• Hands‑on with LLM frameworks/services (e.g., OpenAI, AWS Sagemaker and Bedrock, Hugging Face, LangChain/LangGraph) and agent orchestration patterns.
• Proficiency in RAG techniques, embedding models, and vector databases .
• Familiarity with ML/LLM deployment, prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, and evaluation/guardrail techniques.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and integrating AI services into CI/CD.
• Understanding of responsible AI, privacy, and security considerations for production AI systems.

Desired Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in the financial services industry, developing solutions for consumer banking, portfolio management, trading, compliance or wealth management
• Understanding of banking system and custodial and consumer banking operations
• Prior work embedding AI into developer platforms (e.g., code review automation, test generation, knowledge assistants).
• Experience implementing observability/evaluation agents for monitoring AI workflow performance (quality, drift, latency, cost).
• Exposure to model governance and risk management practices (e.g., model documentation, validation, monitoring, auditability).
• Prior work embedding AI into developer platforms (e.g., code review automation, test generation, knowledge assistants).

Education and Certifications

· Required: Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or related discipline

· Preferred: Master's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science or related discipline

Pay Transparency 

The salary range for this position is $ 127,520 - $ 191,280 per year  plus 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.

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.

Equal Employment and Opportunity Employer

Job Applicant Data Privacy Policy

Background Check

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the candidate successfully passing a background check, which may include initial credit, motor vehicle record, public record, prior employment verification, and criminal background checks. Results of the background check are individually reviewed based upon legal requirements imposed by our regulators and with consideration of the nature and gravity of the background history and the job offered. Any offer of employment will include further information.