Principal Applied AI Engineer

Aviva plc; Greater London; On-site; GBP 92,000 - 124,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus opportunity

Generous pension scheme

Private Medical Benefit

Up to 40% discount on Aviva products

Share matching plan

Flexible working

Volunteer days

Job summary

Aviva plc is seeking a Principal Applied AI Engineer to lead the design and delivery of enterprise-grade AI systems. You will influence standards, governance, and engineering practices to scale AI responsibly across the business.

The role spans architecture, tooling, and collaboration with product teams to translate AI opportunities into scalable solutions. You’ll shape the Applied AI Engineering capability, mentor teams, and hire to grow capabilities, while aligning with regulatory and

Qualifications

• Delivering production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale.
• Expert-level Python engineering and multi-agent architectures.
• Context engineering, retrieval systems and memory architectures.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Leading the architecture and delivery of multi-agent AI systems for high-value business use cases.
• Defining engineering standards across orchestration architectures and memory design.
• Building reusable AI capabilities and enterprise tooling integration.
• Establishing quality, safety and governance standards for production AI systems.
• Providing technical leadership, architecture reviews and mentoring.
• Partnering with business and product teams to translate AI opportunities into scalable solutions.

Skills

Production AI systems

Python engineering

Multi-agent architectures

Context engineering

MCP server & SKILL.md design

Model fine-tuning

Voice AI pipelines

AI quality controls

AI coding agents

AWS cloud architectures

Tools

Kubernetes

Confluence

Job description

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.

A bit about the job:

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.

You’ll be responsible for :

• 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.

Skills and experience we are looking for:

You’ll bring experience in many of these areas:

• Delivering production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale.
• Expert-level Python engineering.
• 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.
• Spec-driven development using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, GH CLI, OpenCode)
• 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.

Why Aviva:

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.

Whatyou’llget for this role:

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 by investing in you. We have so much to offer when it comes to being an Aviva colleague:

• Salary:London: Salary from £124K + bonus + excellent benefits National: Salary from £92K + bonus + excellent benefits(depending on location, skills, experience, and qualifications)
• Bonus opportunity –12% of annual salary Actual amount depends on your performance and Aviva’s.
• Generouspensionscheme eg if you put in 8%, Aviva adds 14%.
• 29 daysholidayplus bank holidays, with theoptionto buy or sell up to 5 days
• Aviva-funded Private Medical Benefitto help you get expert support when you need it
• Up to 40%discount on Aviva products, and other retailer discounts
• Up to £1,200 of free Aviva shares per year through ourMatching Share PlanandSave As You Earnscheme
• Brilliantlysupportive policiesincluding parental and carer’s leave
• Flexible benefitsto suit you, includingsustainability optionssuch as cycle to work.
• Make a difference, be part of ourAviva Communitiesand use your 3paid volunteering days to help others
• We take yourwellbeingseriously with lots of support and tools

Take a look to learn more. Put a salary into this calculator to see what your total Aviva Reward could be.

Aviva is for everyone:

We’reinclusive and welcome everyone–we want applications from all backgrounds and experiences.

We flex locations, hours and working patterns to suit our customers, business, and you. Most of our people are smart working – spendingatleast50% of their time in our offices every week–combining the benefits of flexibility, with time together with colleagues.

To find out more about working at Aviva take a look here

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