A professional man in a suit is smiling into the camera in the Dublin office of Citi.
Prag Sharma, senior vice-president at Citi Innovation Labs. Image: Connor McKenna/Siliconrepublic.com

Take a look inside the inner workings of Citi and its Innovation Labs

10 Dec 2019

From blockchain engineers to business analysts and systems experts, there are plenty of opportunities at Citi and its Dublin Innovation Lab.

At Citi in Dublin, the team prides itself on diversity. And that’s particularly true at the company’s Innovation Lab, as we learned from some of its key people.

We visited its city centre offices at North Wall Quay, getting the chance to meet with some of the individuals working there and to learn more about life at the company.

As chief information officer for Citibank Europe, Claire Chung spoke to us about the organisation’s aims. “Our mission is quite simple – it’s to serve our clients, and to do so in a trusted way and to be a trusted partner for them,” she said.

For Chung, getting to understand “how you’re delivering to your clients on a daily basis” is one of the reasons she loves working in technology and Citi.

Blockchain engineering at Citi

The Innovation Lab was set up in the Dublin office 10 years ago – the first of a global network of six, with one of its core areas of research and development being blockchain. So, we talked to blockchain engineer Amber Higgins about a typical day in her line of work.

She explained that every day for her is different, “doing a huge variety of things”. From market research to solution design sessions, she interacts with co-workers and clients alike to “figure out what is the best approach to solve a particular problem”.

“One of the important things that I have to do is to be able to harness the diverse perspectives and skillsets of all of the individuals that I meet,” she added.

‘People with diverse skillsets’

Finally, we spoke to Prag Sharma, emerging technology development lead at the Innovation Lab. According to Sharma, Citi has “a very diverse group of individuals that work for it”, but being based in the lab means his team has “special requirements on top of the diversity that’s already present in Citi”.

What does that look like in terms of the positions working together to drive the emerging technologies department forward?

“We have a distributed systems expert, we have Java developers, we have business analysts, agile programme managers,” Sharma said. “So we have a lot of different skillsets that are needed to make innovation happen.”

Responsible for a team of data scientists and blockchain experts, he added that getting to work “very closely with people with diverse skillsets” at Citi is what “makes for a really interesting work environment”.

Want to work at Citi? Check out the Citi Careers page for current vacancies.

Lisa Ardill
By Lisa Ardill

Lisa Ardill joined Silicon Republic as senior careers reporter in July 2019. She has a BA in neuroscience and a master’s degree in science communication. She is also a semi-published poet and a big fan of doggos. Lisa briefly served as Careers Editor at Silicon Republic before leaving the company in June 2021.

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