Principal Applied AI Engineer

Aviva; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 92,000 - 124,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Pension

Holiday

Private medical

Product discounts

Share plan

Volunteer days

Cycle to work

Parental leave

Carer’s leave

Flexible benefits

Job summary

Aviva in the UK is seeking a Principal Applied AI Engineer to lead the design and delivery of high-value AI solutions at enterprise scale. You’ll shape standards, governance and engineering capabilities for AI at scale across the business.

You’ll own multi-agent AI system architectures, define orchestration and memory designs, and mentor teams while partnering with business, product and architecture functions to translate opportunities into scalable, compliant solutions in financial services.

Qualifications

• Deliver production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale.
• Experience with multi-agent architectures and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of context engineering and memory architectures.
• Model fine-tuning at scale (PEFT/QLoRA) and end-to-end AI pipelines.
• Experience with AWS-based cloud architectures and production governance.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and delivery of multi-agent AI systems for high-value use cases.
• Define engineering standards across orchestration, memory and integration.
• Build reusable AI capabilities and enterprise tooling.
• Establish quality, safety and governance standards for production AI.
• Provide technical leadership, architecture reviews and mentoring.
• Partner with business, product and architecture teams to translate AI opportunities into scalable solutions.
• Grow Applied AI Engineering capability through hiring and coaching.

Skills

Production AI systems

LLM-powered systems

Multi-agent architectures

Context engineering

Memory architectures

MCP servers

Model fine-tuning

Voice AI pipelines

AI quality controls

AWS cloud architectures

Technical leadership

Tools

MCP servers

Skill.md design

Orchestration frameworks

Job description

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.
• 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.

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.

What you’ll get 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.
• Generous pension scheme eg if you put in 8%, Aviva adds 14%.
• 29 days holiday plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to 5 days
• Aviva-funded Private Medical Benefit to 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 our Matching Share Plan and Save As You Earn scheme
• Brilliantly supportive policies including parental and carer’s leave
• Flexible benefits to suit you, including sustainability options such as cycle to work .
• Make a difference, be part of our Aviva Communities and use your 3 paid volunteering days to help others
• We take your wellbeing seriously 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’re inclusive and welcome everyone – we want applications from all backgrounds and experiences.

Excited but not sure you tick every box? Even if you don’t, we’d still encourage you to apply. We also consider all forms of flexible working, including part time and job shares.

We flex locations, hours and working patterns to suit our customers, business, and you. Most of our people are smart working – spending at least 50% 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

We interview every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for the job.