Goldman Sachs and Citi Are Hiring AI Talent From Outside Banking

According to eFinancialCareers, many banks have built out their AI capabilities in recent years, so the talent pool of AI experts in banking is ever-growing. Sometimes you need a bit of help from outside, however; Goldman Sachs and Citi are hiring new AI managing directors (MDs) from big tech and consulting. This week, Goldman hired Washington-based Omer Zaki as an MD for AI and foundational infrastructure. He was most recently a VP of AI infrastructure innovation at Oracle, but he spent the bulk of his career with AWS. Latterly, he was a director of product management working on agent-based automation services. Goldman has along history of hiring from AWS; its chief information officer, Marco Argenti, was an AWS vice president. Zaki isn't the only AWS alum to join this month. Goldman announced last week that Archana Vemulapalli joined as a partner and head of AI product management and strategic relations. She was most recently a corporate vice president for AMD, but she held multiple senior roles at AWS including head of Americas solutions architecture. Citi, meanwhile, hired Jerry Lavish in New York as an MD and global head of AI risk, approvals and portfolio oversight. He was most recently an MD at tech consultancy Accenture, where he was the responsible AI lead for financial services in the Americas. He previously focused on using agentic AI in the governance process, which will be useful as the bank finishes its data transformation project.