Aviva
Principal Applied AI Engineer
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Principal Applied AI Engineer
Location: London, Birmingham, Bristol, Eastleigh, Glasgow, Leatherhead, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Perth, Sheffield, Worthing, or York
Salary
- London: Salary from £124K + bonus + excellent benefits
- National: Salary from £92K + bonus + excellent benefits (depending on location, skills, experience, and qualifications)
About the Role
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.
About the Business
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.
Key Responsibilities
- Leading the technical design and delivery of some of Aviva's most complex and high-impact AI solutions.
- 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 organization.
- 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.
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Skills and Experience
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 organization.
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
- 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 performance and Aviva’s).
- Generous pension scheme: If you put in 8%, Aviva adds 14%.
- Holiday: 29 days holiday plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to 5 days.
- Private Medical Benefit: Aviva-funded to help you get expert support when needed.
- Discounts: Up to 40% discount on Aviva products and other retailer discounts.
- Share Plan: Up to £1,200 of free Aviva shares per year through the Matching Share Plan and Save As You Earn scheme.
- Supportive Policies: Including parental and carer’s leave.
- Flexible Benefits: Including sustainability options such as cycle to work.
- Volunteering: 3 paid volunteering days to help others.
- Wellbeing Support: Lots of support and tools.
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About Us
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.
Accessibility
We interview every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for the job.
Once you’ve applied, please send us an email stating that you have a disclosed disability, and we’ll interview you.
How to Apply
We’d love it if you could submit your application online. If you require an alternative method of applying, please give Kirthi a call on +447387534297 or send an email to kirthi.kanikireddy@aviva.com.
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