Principal Applied AI Engineer

📣 Principal Applied AI Engineer — AI at Enterprise Scale

💰 Competitive salary + bonus + employee shares + generous pension

📍 Hybrid — multiple UK locations; Hybrid with onsite 50% of the week

🤖 Multi-Agent Systems · Python · LLM Engineering · AWS

🏢 Enterprise AI · Technical Leadership · Production Delivery

I’m working with a major insurance and financial services organisation looking for a Principal Applied AI Engineer to help shape how AI is designed, delivered and scaled across the business.

AI is already supporting areas including claims summarisation, medical underwriting, customer service and fraud detection. This role will help build the next generation of those capabilities, combining hands-on engineering with influence over technical standards and direction.

You’ll lead the architecture and delivery of complex AI solutions, working with business, product and architecture teams to turn opportunities into production systems.

Alongside delivery, you’ll help define how teams build, evaluate and operate AI reliably, with quality, safety and customer trust central to the work.

What you’ll be working on:

• Leading the architecture and delivery of multi-agent AI systems for high-value business use cases
• Defining approaches to context engineering, retrieval, memory, orchestration and multimodal systems
• Building reusable capabilities, including agent tools, MCP servers, skills and shared engineering assets
• Establishing evaluation frameworks, production quality controls and AI governance standards
• Leading the adoption of spec-driven development using AI coding agents
• Providing architecture reviews, mentoring engineers and supporting hiring and capability development

Could be a strong fit if you bring experience across many of these areas:

• Delivering production AI or LLM-powered systems at enterprise scale
• Expert-level Python engineering
• Designing multi-agent architectures and working with orchestration frameworks
• Building retrieval systems and managing context and memory for AI applications
• Designing evaluations and operating AI quality controls in production
• Building AI and cloud architectures on AWS
• Providing technical leadership across complex engineering environments
• Explaining technical decisions clearly to senior business, technology or regulatory stakeholders

The wider experience the team is interested in includes MCP server and SKILL.md design, enterprise tooling integration, model fine-tuning using PEFT/(Q)LoRA, end-to-end voice pipelines and AI coding agents.

Experience delivering AI in financial services, insurance or another regulated environment is also relevant, particularly where innovation needs to be balanced with governance, risk and customer trust.

You don’t need to tick every box. The team welcomes applicants with experience across many of these areas, so the breadth of the specification shouldn’t discourage a conversation.

Technical influence is a significant part of the opportunity.

You’ll help shape engineering practices across the organisation while staying close to the technology—supporting other engineers, reviewing architectural decisions and helping teams turn promising AI ideas into scalable solutions.

Package and working arrangements:

• Competitive salary
• Annual bonus opportunity
• Employee share schemes
• Generous employer pension contributions
• Holiday allowance plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell additional days
• Company-funded private medical benefit
• Flexible working options, including consideration of part-time arrangements and job shares

The role is available across multiple UK office locations, including London and major regional cities.

The usual hybrid arrangement involves at least 50% of working time in the office each week. The specific team pattern and preferred office should be confirmed during the process.