Senior Principal AI Engineer

Location: London, UK Wide (50% Remote)

Inside / Outside IR35: Inside IR35

Duration: 6 Month Contract

A bit about the job

We are looking for an experienced Senior Principal Engineer to provide enterprise-level technical leadership across Aviva’s technology landscape.

This is a high-impact senior individual contributor role, focused on shaping long-term technology direction, engineering standards and strategic investment decisions. You’ll use your technical expertise and influence to drive modernisation, simplification, resilience and engineering excellence across critical technology platforms.

Working closely with senior engineering, architecture and product leaders, you’ll provide technical challenge and assurance on major initiatives, influence strategic decisions and help build engineering capability across the organisation.

This role is ideal for a highly experienced technical leader who can operate at an enterprise level, communicate effectively with senior stakeholders and influence outcomes through expertise rather than formal authority.

Skills and experience we're looking for

• Proven experience operating as a Senior Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer or equivalent senior technical authority within a complex enterprise environment.
• Deep expertise in one or more engineering disciplines, such as Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, Cloud, Infrastructure, Data, AI/ML, Security or Quality Engineering.
• Strong understanding of modern technology architecture, engineering operating models, resilience, security and regulatory considerations.
• Demonstrable experience shaping enterprise technology strategy, engineering standards and long-term technical direction.
• Experience making complex technical trade-offs, balancing factors such as resilience, security, customer outcomes, cost and sustainability.
• Strong ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive strategic decisions without relying on organisational hierarchy.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts for senior and executive audiences.
• Experience providing technical challenge, assurance and risk assessment across major technology programmes.
• Strong understanding of modern engineering practices including DevOps, SRE, CI/CD, observability, performance and secure-by-design.
• Experience developing or contributing to enterprise-level technical strategies, reference architectures, standards, patterns and guardrails.
• Demonstrable experience coaching and mentoring engineers and building communities of practice.
• Awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends and regulatory expectations, with the ability to translate these into practical technology recommendations.
• Experience working with senior internal stakeholders and external partners, suppliers, industry forums or professional networks.
• Degree-level qualification or equivalent technical experience.
• Professional recognition such as Chartered Engineer, FIET or equivalent is desirable, or demonstrable industry leadership of comparable standing.
• Evidence of thought leadership, industry participation, published insights or contribution to the wider engineering community would be advantageous.