Lead Infrastructure Automation Engineer (SRE/AI)

Discover your future at Citi

Working at Citi is far more than just a job. A career with us means joining a team of approximately 219,000 dedicated people from around the globe. At Citi, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community and make a real impact.

Job Overview

This is a senior, hands-on Individual Contributor (IC) role designed to be the primary engine of our "No Ops" transformation. The Lead Infrastructure Automation Engineer will act as a subject matter expert, solution architect, and hands-on developer responsible for designing and implementing the high-impact automation and Agentic AI solutions that will redefine our operational model.

This role is for a versatile technologist who is passionate about eliminating toil, building intelligent systems, and applying AI to solve real-world infrastructure problems at enterprise scale. Your mission will be to tackle our most pressing operational challenges by architecting and developing robust, scalable automation platforms. This is a strategic, long-term role focused on continuous evolution and driving a fundamental shift in how we operate.

Core Responsibilities

1. AI-Driven Automation & System Design

• Architect, design, and develop the core frameworks for our agentic AI and automation initiatives, utilizing platforms like ARC, ServiceNow, and Ansible.
• Act as the lead hands-on developer for creating intelligent, event-driven systems that can autonomously diagnose and remediate infrastructure issues.
• Ensure solutions are scalable, resilient, and maintainable, applying SRE and software engineering best practices to our operational code.

2. Intelligent Incident & Problem Management

• Engineer solutions for automated root cause analysis, leveraging AIOps platforms and machine learning concepts to move from reactive to predictive operations.
• Develop systems that can intelligently correlate events from disparate monitoring tools (Netcool, Spectrum, Splunk) to identify systemic issues before they escalate.
• Build and refine self-healing capabilities for our network and server infrastructure, reducing MTTR for common failure scenarios.

3. End-to-End Process & Workflow Automation

• Analyze and re-engineer core operational processes—including Change Management, Incident Task Management, and hardware provisioning—to be automation-first.
• Utilize Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles to codify and automate routine procedures, ensuring consistency and compliance.
• Develop integrations between our core platforms (SNOW, Ansible, ARC) to create seamless, end-to-end automated workflows that require minimal human intervention.

4. Service Modernization & Shift-Left Enablement

• Act as a technical leader for absorbing new workstreams, such as the recent transfer of L1 Application Support, by identifying and automating the associated operational toil.
• Consult with other teams across Foundational Services to design "shift-left" solutions, where ECC's automation platform can take on operational tasks from higher-level support teams.
• Continuously evaluate new technologies and methodologies to ensure our operational capabilities evolve with the firm's needs.

Initial Key Initiatives (Examples of Problems to Solve)

To make this tangible, your initial focus will be on leading the design and delivery of our four highest-priority initiatives, which are foundational to our "No Ops" strategy and have a committed ROI:

• Distributed & Network Hardware Incident Automation: Build an AI-driven system to auto-diagnose hardware failures (servers, network gear) and trigger automated remediation or replacement workflows.
• End-to-End Change Automation: Automate the full lifecycle of standard hardware changes (create, review, implement, validate) using Ansible and ServiceNow.
• ITASK & Workflow Orchestration: Use NLP and agentic AI to auto-generate and manage dependent tasks (e.g., LCON dispatches, RMA tracking), removing manual coordination.
• L1 Application Support Toil Elimination: Analyze the newly absorbed L1 App Support workload and deploy automation to handle high-volume, low-complexity tasks.

Secondary Responsibilities

• Automation Evangelism & Mentorship: Act as a subject matter expert and mentor to junior analysts, evangelizing "automation-first" principles and contributing to upskilling the team.
• Continuous Improvement: Proactively identify new process gaps and inefficiencies, proposing and implementing data-driven improvements to enhance operational stability and efficiency.

Qualifications

Required Experience & Expertise

• 7+ years in enterprise infrastructure, with a strong background in either Network Operations or Systems Administration (Linux/Windows) in a 24/7 environment.
• Proven, hands-on experience designing and building automation solutions that eliminate manual operational work.
• Advanced proficiency in automation and IaC tools, particularly Ansible and Terraform. Must be able to write, maintain, and debug complex playbooks and modules.
• Strong scripting and development skills in Python. Experience with building operational tools, data processing scripts, or interacting with APIs is required.
• Experience applying AI/ML concepts to operational problems. This includes implementing solutions using AIOps platforms (Moogsoft, Datadog AI, etc.) and/or leveraging AI agentic frameworks (like ARC, LangChain, AutoGen) for intelligent automation.
• Deep understanding of observability principles and hands-on experience with platforms like Splunk, Elastic, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• Expert-level cross-domain troubleshooting skills across network, server, and application layers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a dedicated SRE or DevOps Engineering role.
• Experience with generative AI and LLMs for operational use cases (code generation, documentation, chatbot development).
• Familiarity with financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP, CKA, HashiCorp, CCNP, RHCE).

------------------------------------------------------

Job Family Group:

Technology

------------------------------------------------------

Job Family:

Infrastructure

------------------------------------------------------

Time Type:

Full time

------------------------------------------------------

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

------------------------------------------------------

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

------------------------------------------------------

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.