Senior Applied AI Engineer

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 Senior Applied AI Engineer, you’ll operate as a technical authority within our newly formed function. You’ll lead the end-to-end architecture and delivery of our most complex multi-agent AI systems, while establishing the canonical engineering standards, reusable capabilities and governance frameworks that define AI across the entire organisation.

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 at genuine scale, leading through expertise and building production-grade AI that delivers measurable value, we would love to hear from you.

A bit about the job:

• You’ll carry both a high-impact delivery mandate and an institution-building mandate: delivering agentic AI systems for complex business use cases while ensuring the tools, patterns and knowledge created are adopted at scale.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Leading the end-to-end architecture and delivery of multi-agent AI systems across customer-facing and operational domains.
• Defining and owning Aviva’s canonical engineering patterns for applied AI, including orchestration architectures, context engineering, MCP integration, memory design, fine-tuning and multimodal systems.
• Building and maintaining a reusable library of agent tools, MCP servers, skills and shared engineering assets adopted across AI delivery teams.
• Establishing quality, safety and governance standards for production AI systems, designing evaluation frameworks to manage model risk before any system is built.
• Leading structured research programmes on emerging models and techniques, translating findings into actionable delivery guidance.
• Providing technical leadership and mentorship to mid-level and junior engineers through architecture reviews, code reviews and knowledge sharing.
• Partnering with business, product and Enterprise Architecture teams to translate complex AI opportunities into commercially viable, scalable solutions.
• Ensuring compliance with FCA Consumer Duty, GDPR and internal AI governance standards, including bias detection and fairness controls.

Skills and experience we’re looking for:

• Enterprise AI Delivery: Extensive hands-on experience delivering LLM-powered systems and production AI at scale.
• Python Mastery: Expert-level Python engineering, writing and reviewing production-quality code for complex multi-agent systems.
• Agentic Architectures: Deep expertise in agent orchestration frameworks (AWS Strands, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, DSPy or raw agent loop design).
• Context & Retrieval: Advanced context engineering expertise, including multi-hop retrieval, knowledge graphs (Neptune/Nebula), structured memory injection and dynamic prompt construction.
• MCP & Tooling: Advanced knowledge of Model Context Protocol (MCP), designing and implementing server architectures for enterprise tooling integration.
• Model Fine-Tuning: Experience with model fine-tuning at scale using PEFT, (Q)LoRA, Unsloth, Axolotl or Hugging Face TRL.
• Voice AI Pipelines: Building end-to-end voice AI pipelines incorporating STT/TTS models (ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Qwen).
• Evaluation & Governance: Designing evaluation frameworks, operating quality controls in production and balancing innovation with risk, safety and regulatory alignment.
• Cloud Architecture: Strong understanding of AWS cloud architecture for AI workloads (SageMaker, Bedrock, MSK, EKS).
• Stakeholder Communication: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present technical decisions clearly to senior business, product or regulatory stakeholders.

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 from £66K + bonus + excellent benefits (depending on location, skills, experience and qualifications).
• Bonus opportunity 10% of annual salary - Actual amount depends on your performance.
• Generous pension scheme: eg if you put in 8%, Aviva adds 14%.
• 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.