Principal AI Engineer in London

Who are we? Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 23,000 employees spanning over 56 countries. People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work/life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

About The Role: Howden Group Services is expanding its AI & Data Science capabilities and is looking for a contract Principal AI Engineer to help accelerate our transformation and build enterprise-grade solutions with AI at their core that will be used by hundreds of colleagues across the Group. You will report into the Group Head of Data Science and will bring deep technical expertise on developing, building and productionising AI applications. You will be given freedom to experiment, test and bring new technologies that push the envelope on using AI to solve enterprise problems and apply them to the complex business domain of commercial insurance.

Role Responsibilities:

• Design and implement robust Machine Learning and AI workflows using orchestration tools such as Airflow (or equivalent tools more suited to AI workflows).
• Ground LLM solutions by integrating appropriate data sources, design and develop RAG architectures, design and craft effective prompt templates, apply constraints to guide model behaviour and validate AI outputs against expected results.
• Work with our Data Platform Engineering team to build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for ML and AI solutions covering model training, evaluation and deployment.
• Design and implement model registries, versioning systems, and experiment tracking to ensure full reproducibility of all model releases.
• Build model monitoring solutions tracking performance, drift, accuracy and overall solution health.

Your Skills:

• Track record of shipping production ML and AI systems at scale in enterprise environments.
• Extensive experience deploying ML and AI solutions through CI/CD pipelines, MLOps best practices, model lifecycle management, and software development best practices (git, testing & code review).
• Experience with LLM architectures, including vector databases, RAG architectures, and semantic search systems, and implementing these to enterprise-grade production standards.
• Experience of designing and implementing monitoring and solution health KPIs.
• Experience of working in cloud AI ecosystems. Familiarity with AzureML, Azure AI Foundry and/or Databricks a strong plus.
• Deep Python programming skills and software engineering experience applied to data science solutions.
• Ability to write documentation that others can rely on and use.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and an understanding of API Management frameworks.
• Knowledge of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent communication standards.
• Working understanding of agentic AI patterns, multi-agent systems, and autonomous decision-making frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise AI frameworks (LangChain AutoGPT, CrewAI or similar).
• Experience setting technical standards, governance frameworks, and performance benchmarks in a regulated industry.

At Howden, we are looking to build a diverse team and promote the development of individuals of all backgrounds. If you have experience of mentoring and coaching others, we’d encourage you to apply if you meet the majority of these requirements and are driven by learning, developing and picking up the required skills to make you successful in your role.

Core Responsibilities for all Staff:

• Achieve Results through Relationships with All Parties: Deliver a personal performance that contributes towards Group and/or Company achieving their objectives. Achieve lasting relationships with all parties (internal clients, suppliers, third parties and other staff).
• Delivery of Service: Consistently deliver an excellent and comprehensive service, on-time, within budget and to, or exceeding quality expectations.
• Conduct and Integrity: Ensure all dealings are carried out with integrity and professionalism. Act in utmost good faith, in accordance with Group and/or Company policies and never risk the Company’s or the Group’s reputation.
• Reporting: Monitor and report on Business Units’ issues. Provide relevant management information to senior management. Any other reasonable duties, as required.

What do we offer in return?

A career that you define. At Howden, we value diversity – there is no one Howden type. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us:

• Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new.
• We support each other in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges.
• We are determined to make a positive difference at work and beyond.

Reasonable adjustments: We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations at Howden to ensure that our positions align well with your needs. Besides the usual adjustments such as software, IT, and office setups, we can also accommodate other changes such as flexible hours or hybrid working. If you're excited by this role but have some doubts about whether it’s the right fit for you, send us your application – if your profile fits the role’s criteria, we will be in touch to assist in helping to get you set up with any reasonable adjustments you may require.