Staff Applied AI Engineer in London

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 Staff Applied AI Engineer, you will operate at the intersection of deep technical delivery and business enablement. You’ll bring hands-on engineering excellence and a high degree of autonomy to design, build and deploy production AI agents across our customer-facing and internal operations.

Technology and AI are central to Aviva’s strategy. Today, we serve over 25 million customers globally, support 7.4 million registered MyAviva 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 challenges across the full applied AI stack – from context engineering and agent orchestration through to evaluation, memory and multimodal interfaces – we would love to hear from you.

A bit about the job:

• You’ll combine hands-on technical delivery with architectural ownership for individual AI systems.
• You’ll work closely with product and business teams to realise high-value AI use cases while contributing to the canonical engineering patterns that define how AI is built at Aviva.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Designing and delivering production AI agents and multi-agent pipelines across customer-facing and operational domains.
• Owning architecture and framework selections for individual AI systems, defining memory strategies, orchestration patterns and tool integration methods.
• Implementing robust evaluation frameworks (using DeepEval, Arize Phoenix, Galileo, or LangSmith) to define and measure AI quality, safety and fairness before systems go live.
• Engineering advanced context pipelines, leveraging chunking, hybrid search, re-ranking, knowledge graphs and dynamic prompt construction.
• Building and consuming Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to integrate enterprise tooling and shared capabilities.
• Maintaining production system reliability and supporting incident response for deployed AI agents.
• Providing technical guidance to junior engineers and participating actively in architecture reviews.
• Ensuring responsible AI compliance with FCA Consumer Duty, GDPR and internal governance frameworks.

Skills and experience we’re looking for:

• Production Python Engineering: Strong Python skills, writing clean, testable, production-quality code using AI coding tools fluently (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex).
• LLM & Agent Systems: Proven experience building LLM-powered applications and agent pipelines in production environments.
• Context Engineering: Deep understanding of context pipelines, including chunking, embedding selection, hybrid search, re-ranking, knowledge graphs and prompt construction.
• Orchestration Frameworks: Hands-on experience with agent orchestration frameworks (AWS Strands, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, DSPy, or raw API agent loops).
• MCP Integration: Practical experience with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), designing or consuming MCP servers.
• Evaluation & Memory: Experience implementing production evaluation frameworks and managing agent memory architectures (session, long-term, semantic memory / Mem0).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Comfortable with AWS cloud infrastructure and operating production AI workloads.
• Stakeholder Communication: Strong communication skills across technical, business and product audiences.

Desirable Experience:

• Exposure to model fine-tuning (Unsloth, Axolotl, Hugging Face TRL), voice AI pipelines (ElevenLabs, Deepgram), or working within a regulated financial services environment.

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.

What you’ll get for this role:

• 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

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.