Principal AI Architect in Cardiff

Aveni is an AI FinTech company building the next generation of AI products and platforms for the UK financial services industry. Our mission is to make AI work in one of the world's most regulated, high-stakes environments; helping financial advisers, compliance teams, and wealth managers do their jobs better, faster, and with greater confidence. We're a high growth company at an exciting inflection point: our core products are live and scaling, and we're building out an ambitious 2026 roadmap of agentic AI capabilities that puts us at the frontier of what AI can do in financial services.

This is one of the most exciting and wide ranging senior technical roles at Aveni. As Principal AI Architect, you'll sit at the intersection of deep AI expertise and enterprise grade systems architecture. You'll be shaping how Aveni's AI platform is designed, governed, and delivered at scale. You'll work as part of the senior AI leadership team reporting to the CTO, and play a central role in one of the most consequential challenges in enterprise AI: making agentic systems that are powerful, safe, and trusted in regulated environments. Equally, you'll be a key figure externally, designing deployment architectures for large UK financial institutions adopting Aveni's products, and helping them understand and trust what our AI can do. If you're deeply technical, genuinely excited about where AI and agents are heading, and want to shape how a fast-scaling FinTech builds its AI backbone, this role is built for you.

What you'll be doing:

• Owning the architectural design of Aveni's AI and agentic platform. Planning how we route and orchestrate AI, how agents execute, how guardrails are enforced, and how we integrate multiple AI providers alongside our own proprietary model.
• Defining architectural patterns for our next generation of agentic products. AI-driven guidance agents and an AI assurance framework for regulated financial workflows, ensuring they are safe, explainable, and compliant.
• Partnering with senior engineers across our product teams to translate platform capabilities into well designed product architectures, ensuring consistency and reuse across everything we build.
• Acting as Aveni's senior AI solution architect for enterprise clients, producing deployment architectures, running technical workshops, and supporting pre-sales processes that help large financial institutions adopt our products with confidence.
• Collaborating with our research and innovation team to translate technology evaluations and prototypes into production ready architectural decisions, and working with our platform and infrastructure teams to ensure AI observability and operations are built on solid architectural foundations.
• Setting AI architectural standards and governance across the organisation, shaping our technical strategy alongside the CTO, and ensuring our architecture meets the security, compliance, and regulatory requirements of the UK financial services sector.
• Staying genuinely ahead of the curve by tracking where AI and agentic systems are heading, bringing a futurist mindset to how Aveni's architecture needs to evolve, and making sure we're building towards what matters next.

What we're looking for:

• Extensive experience in software or AI/ML engineering, with a substantial portion spent in architecture roles, ideally spanning both platform and solution architecture.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of LLM and agentic system design. You understand how to build systems that use AI reliably, safely, and at scale, not just how to call an API.
• Experience working with enterprise clients as a solution or technical architect. You're comfortable running architecture workshops, producing deployment designs, and earning the trust of technical stakeholders at large organisations.
• Strong practical knowledge of cloud-native, event-driven architectures on AWS, and comfort with Python and/or Node.js in AI engineering contexts.
• Familiarity with AI governance standards and the regulatory landscape. You understand what responsible AI design looks like in practice, especially in regulated industries.
• A futurist mindset. You follow AI and agentic research closely, have strong opinions about where things are heading, and translate that into concrete architectural thinking rather than vague enthusiasm.
• Outstanding communication skills. You're equally comfortable producing rigorous technical documentation for an internal architecture review and explaining deployment architecture to a CTO at a financial institution.

Why Aveni:

• You'll be architecting AI systems at the frontier — agentic platforms, proprietary models, multi provider AI — in one of the most demanding and consequential domains in the world.
• You'll work with a genuinely strong team: senior AI, research, and engineering leaders who care deeply about getting AI architecture right, and engineers who are ready to be challenged and elevated.
• Aveni is at a defining moment. Our core products are live and growing, and the 2026 roadmap is ambitious. This is a chance to shape an organisation's technical direction before it's set in stone.
• We're a mission driven company: the work matters. Better AI in financial services means better outcomes for advisers, compliance teams, and ultimately the people they serve.