Principal Applied AI Engineer

Aviva; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 74,000 - 124,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous pension

Private Medical Benefit

Flexible benefits

Volunteer days

Job summary

Aviva is seeking a Principal Applied AI Engineer to architect and deliver large-scale AI solutions. You’ll define standards for orchestration, memory design, and evaluation, while building reusable AI capabilities and enterprise tooling.

A strong focus on governance, safety and scalable delivery will guide your leadership across teams and stakeholders. You’ll work with business and architecture peers to translate opportunities into enterprise-ready AI, enabling responsible innovation in

Qualifications

• Experience delivering production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale.
• Knowledge of multi-agent architectures and orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with context retrieval and memory architectures.
• Ability to lead architectural reviews and guide engineering standards in enterprise environments.
• Exposure to financial services, insurance, or regulated domains is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and delivery of high-value AI solutions for Aviva.
• Set engineering standards across orchestration, memory design and evaluation frameworks.
• Build reusable AI capabilities and enterprise tooling.
• Ensure quality, safety and governance for production AI systems.
• Mentor teams and drive spec-driven development with stakeholders.
• Partner with business, product and architecture teams to scale AI opportunities.

Skills

Production AI

LLM systems

Multi-agent

Context engineering

AWS/Cloud

Technical leadership

Regulated domain

Tools

MCP servers

SKILL.md design

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.