Lead AI Engineer in London

This is a great job for someone who thrives on building robust, production-grade generative and agentic AI systems that create significant, measurable value. They will find fulfilment in leading engineering teams, setting high standards (architecture, code quality, and operational readiness), and mentoring colleagues, all while maintaining hands-on technical excellence. The role requires the ability to distil complex concepts into clear, actionable ideas, fostering effective collaboration with stakeholders spanning product, data, and technology. This person will be the technical lead for our AI transformation, upholding the highest engineering standards for responsible, transparent, and ethical AI in a large FTSE 100 company.

A bit about the job: Within Aviva’s Customer & Marketing (C&M) function, the Customer Science team uses data to understand customers so we can be more relevant and take better actions. We are multi-award-winning, and passionate about driving better customer & commercial outcomes. As Lead AI Engineer, you will be the technical lead who architects and delivers production-grade large language model applications and agentic workflows, create reusable components and reference patterns, and operationalise solutions with robust monitoring, guardrails, and secure deployment practices. You will help teams build AI-enabled applications that consume standardised GenAI services from our internal platform, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned to platform standards. You will champion full lifecycle ownership, from design and build through to deployment, observability, and live service support. You will have a passion for turning AI’s potential into real business value. You will partner closely with the Head of AI, ML engineering, data platform, technology and product teams to ship safe, scalable systems that improve customer outcomes. You’ll set the standards and culture for rewarding, fun careers that deliver large impact from AI applications.

Skills and experience we’re looking for:

• Proven ability to recruit, develop and inspire high-performing engineers, set direction through design/code review, and ship secure, scalable products.
• Significant experience building production systems with LLMs and agents, including prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation, plus hands-on use of orchestration frameworks (for example LangGraph or LangChain).
• Strong Python with experience in ML libraries and toolchains, with the ability to engineer maintainable, testable services (not just notebooks or prototypes).
• Experience designing and shipping cloud-native, API-led services, with cloud infrastructure expertise (AWS, Azure, or GCP) plus Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong DevSecOps practices (CI/CD, automated testing, security scanning, infrastructure as code), with an ability to optimise performance, resiliency and cost, and a solid awareness of responsible AI, data protection and regulatory expectations.

What you’ll get for this role:

• Salary £110,000 – £130,000 (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 - Aviva will contribute up to 14%, depending on what you put in.
• 29 days holiday plus bank holidays, and you can choose to buy or sell up to 5 days.
• Aviva-funded Private Medical Benefit to help you get expert support when you need it.
• Make your money go further - 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 share in the success of Aviva with our 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 would 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.