From 2005 to 2008, Reichlin served as Director General of Research at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, under the leadership of President Jean-Claude Trichet; she was the first woman in that role.

For the National Bureau of Economic Research she edited volumes III (2006) and VI (2009) of the "International Seminar on Macroeconomics" series published by the University of Chicago Press.

[10] On 20 September 2018 Reichlin was appointed Deputy-Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Banca Carige, representing the majority shareholder Vittorio Malacalza.

She resigned three months later, in December, after the capital increase planned for the bank did not go through the shareholders' meeting due to Malacalza's abstention, which caused the necessary quorum to be lacking.

In early 2021, Reichlin was appointed by the G20 to the High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on financing the global commons for pandemic preparedness and response, co-chaired by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Lawrence Summers.