Senior Principal Applied AI Engineer

Location:
London,
Birmingham, Bristol, Eastleigh, Glasgow, Leatherhead, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Perth, Sheffield, Worthing or York

London:
Salary from £160K + bonus + excellent benefits

National:
Salary from £135K + bonus + excellent benefits

Build AI that matters.

AI is already making a difference across Aviva, helping colleagues and customers through areas such as claims summarisation, medical underwriting, customer service and fraud detection.

As a Senior Principal Applied AI Engineer, you'll help design and deliver the next generation of AI solutions while influencing the standards, governance and engineering capabilities that support AI at scale.

Technology and AI are central to Aviva's strategy. Today, we serve over 25 million customers globally, support 7.4 million registered My Aviva users and continue to invest in the technology foundations that enable innovation h 70% of UK IT applications now cloud-based, we're creating the platform for the next phase of AI adoption across the business.

If you're excited by solving complex technical problems, leading through expertise and building production-grade AI at enterprise scale, we'd love to hear from you.

As a Senior Principal Applied AI Engineer, you will hold accountability for the long-term technical vision, architectural integrity, and operational resilience of critical AI platforms and solutions.

You will act as the senior technical authority for applied AI engineering, ensuring that strategic technology decisions support business objectives, regulatory expectations, and customer outcomes.

You will work closely with senior leaders across Technology, Data, Risk, Security, and the wider business to shape investment priorities, influence enterprise strategy, and ensure the successful adoption of AI capabilities across Aviva.

Through your leadership, you will create the conditions for engineering teams to deliver high-quality, scalable, and trustworthy AI solutions with confidence.

• leading the architecture and delivery of multi-agent AI systems for high-value business use cases.
• defining engineering standards across orchestration architectures, context engineering, MCP integration, memory design, fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks and multimodal systems.
• building reusable AI capabilities including agent tools, MCP servers, skills and shared engineering assets.
• establishing quality, safety and governance standards for production AI systems.
• leading the shift to spec-driven development in the organisation.
• providing technical leadership, architecture reviews and mentoring.
• partnering with business, product and architecture teams to translate AI opportunities into scalable solutions.
• helping grow the Applied AI Engineering capability through hiring, coaching and community leadership.

• Extensive experience leading the strategy, architecture, delivery, and operation of complex applied AI, machine learning, or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale, with accountability for business-critical outcomes.
• Recognised technical authority with a proven track record of setting technology direction, making high-impact architectural decisions, and influencing engineering standards across multiple teams, functions, or domains.
• Deep expertise in software engineering and Python, with the ability to drive engineering excellence, scalability, resilience, security, and operational maturity across large-scale AI platforms.
• Strong experience partnering with senior leaders and executive stakeholders, translating complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes, influencing investment decisions, and aligning diverse groups behind a shared vision.
• Proven ability to lead…