Principal AI Security Engineer
Citizens Financial Group · United States
Principal AI Security Engineer
Your role as Principal Security Engineer 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 a Principal Security Engineer, 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.
Locations & Work Arrangement: Remote is not an option, candidates must be willing to commute to one of the following hub locations with a hybrid schedule of 4 days onsite and 1 day remote per week with flexibility in one of the following hubs:
• Phoenix, AZ • Johnston, RI • Boston, MA • Franklin, TN • Westwood, MA • Pittsburgh, PA • Charlotte, NC • Irving, TX • Cleveland, OH • Philadelphia, PA • Marlton, NJ
The Principle Security Engineer will be responsible for:
• 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 system designs
• 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
• Build and operationalize security controls that protect AI-powered applications, ensuring models, prompts, and outputs are resilient against misuse and abuse.
• Focus on securing the full AI lifecycle—from data ingestion and model training to deployment and runtime—across both internal applications and external platforms.
• Engineer safeguards against emerging AI threats such as prompt injection, data poisoning, model inversion, and unintended data leakage.
• Strengthen identity and access controls for AI systems, including service identities, API protection, and least-privilege access across SaaS and cloud environments.
• Secure integrations between AI components and enterprise systems (databases, APIs, SaaS tools) to prevent unauthorized access and data exfiltration.
• Protect sensitive data used by AI systems through encryption, tokenization, and privacy-preserving techniques across hybrid and cloud-native architectures.
• Continuously monitor AI systems and agentic behaviors for anomalies, policy violations, and malicious activity using logging and detection engineering practices.
• Harden cloud infrastructure that supports AI workloads, including containers, orchestration platforms, and serverless services, ensuring secure configurations.
• Evaluate and manage risks associated with third-party AI SaaS solutions, focusing on data handling, access control, and vendor security posture.
• Integrate automated security testing into AI development pipelines, including adversarial testing and validation of model robustness.
• Lead incident response efforts related to AI systems, investigating misuse, model drift with security implications, and potential data exposure events.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with architects, developers, and governance teams to align AI security practices with business objectives and regulatory requirements.
Required Qualifications
• 8+ years of working experience in data intensive applications or data engineering
• Experience implementing large-scale technological enhancements and/or pivots, including pilot implementation and analysis
• Excellent understanding of AI/ML patterns and techniques
• Excellent understanding of DevOps
• Understanding of python and at least one other programming language
• Experience working with IT infrastructure and cloud development
• Experience with API’s
• Experience designing highly available and resilient solutions, automation, identify opportunity of performance improvements
• A bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in computer science or a related field
• Experience in 2 or 3 of the following technology areas. Infrastructure, Security, DevOps, Application Development, database technologies, cloud computing
Desired Qualifications
• Working experience in the financial services industry
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering or a related discipline
• Executive speaking and presentation skills: formal presentations, white-boarding, large and small group presentations
Education and Certifications
• Required: Bachelor's degree
• Preferred: Degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or related discipline
Pay Transparency
• The salary range for this position is $150,000 to $190,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn additional incentive earnings. Actual pay is based on various factors including, but not limited to, the budget, work location, and relevant skills and experience.
Benefits
Comprehensive benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, retirement plans, parental leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs, and generous paid time off exceeding local requirements.
Citizens Benefits Overview
For an overview of our benefits, visit our Careers site: Citizens Benefits Overview.
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