Principal Applied AI Engineer

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

London:
Salary from £124K + bonus + excellent benefits

National:
Salary from £92K + 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 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 at scale.

With 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.

You'll lead the technical design and delivery of some of Aviva's most complex and high-impact AI solutions while helping define Applied AI Engineering best practice across the business.

• 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.

You'll bring experience in many of these areas:

• Delivering production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale.
• Multi-agent architectures and orchestration frameworks.
• Context engineering, retrieval systems and memory architectures.
• MCP server and SKILL.md design and enterprise tooling integration.
• Model fine-tuning at scale (PEFT/(Q)
  LoRA).
• Building end-to-end voice AI pipelines using STT/TTS models.
• Designing evaluation frameworks and operating AI quality controls in production.
• AWS-based AI and cloud architectures.
• Technical leadership across complex engineering environments.
• Presenting technical decisions clearly to senior business, technology or regulatory stakeholders.
• Delivering AI in financial services, insurance or another regulated environment.
• Balancing innovation with governance, risk, safety and customer trust.

This is an opportunity to help build AI in a highly trusted environment, where customer outcomes, governance and responsible innovation matter.

You'll join a business with proven AI capability, significant digital reach, modern technology foundations and the ambition to scale AI across the organisation.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to influence how AI is engineered, governed and adopted across Aviva, while staying close to the technology itself.

Our purpose - with you today, for a better tomorrow - is a promise we make to our colleagues too. And one of the ways we live up to that promise is…