Principal AI Architect

This is a remote position.

Aveni is an AI FinTech company building the next generation of AI products and platforms for the UK financial services industry. Our mission is to make AI work in one of the world's most regulated, high-stakes environments — helping financial advisers, compliance teams, and wealth managers do their jobs better, faster, and with greater confidence. We're a high-growth company at an exciting inflection point: our core products are live and scaling, and we're building out an ambitious 2026 roadmap of agentic AI capabilities that puts us at the frontier of what AI can do in financial services.

• Owning the architectural design of Aveni's AI and agentic platform — how we route and orchestrate AI, how agents execute, how guardrails are enforced, and how we integrate multiple AI providers alongside our own proprietary model.
• Defining architectural patterns for our next generation of agentic products — AI-driven guidance agents and an AI assurance framework for regulated financial workflows — ensuring they are safe, explainable, and compliant.
• Partnering with senior engineers across our product teams to translate platform capabilities into well-designed product architectures, ensuring consistency and reuse across everything we build.
• Acting as Aveni's senior AI solution architect for enterprise clients — producing deployment architectures, running technical workshops, and supporting pre-sales processes that help large financial institutions adopt our products with confidence.
• Collaborating with our research and innovation team to translate technology evaluations and prototypes into production-ready architectural decisions, and working with our platform and infrastructure teams to ensure AI observability and operations are built on solid architectural foundations.
• Setting AI architectural standards and governance across the organisation — shaping our technical strategy alongside the CTO, and ensuring our architecture meets the security, compliance, and regulatory requirements of the UK financial services sector.
• Staying genuinely ahead of the curve — tracking where AI and agentic systems are heading, bringing a futurist mindset to how Aveni's architecture needs to evolve, and making sure we're building towards what matters next.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• 12+ years in software or AI/ML engineering, with a substantial portion spent in architecture roles — ideally spanning both platform and solution architecture.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of LLM and agentic system design — you understand how to build systems that use AI reliably, safely, and at scale, not just how to call an API.
• Experience working with enterprise clients as a solution or technical architect — you're comfortable running architecture workshops, producing deployment designs, and earning the trust of technical stakeholders at large organisations.
• Strong practical knowledge of cloud-native, event-driven architectures on AWS, and comfort with Python and/or Node.js in AI engineering contexts.
• Familiarity with AI governance standards and the regulatory landscape — you understand what responsible AI design looks like in practice, especially in regulated industries.
• A futurist mindset — you follow AI and agentic research closely, have strong opinions about where things are heading, and translate that into concrete architectural thinking rather than vague enthusiasm.
• Outstanding communication skills — you're equally comfortable producing rigorous technical documentation for an internal architecture review and explaining deployment architecture to a CTO at a financial institution.

• You'll be architecting AI systems at the frontier — agentic platforms, proprietary models, multi-provider AI — in one of the most demanding and consequential domains in the world.
• You'll work with a genuinely strong team: senior AI, research, and engineering leaders who care deeply about getting AI architecture right, and engineers who are ready to be challenged and elevated.
• Aveni is at a defining moment — core products are live and growing, and the 2026 roadmap is ambitious. This is a chance to shape an organisation's technical direction before it's set in stone.
• We're a mission-driven company: the work matters. Better AI in financial services means better outcomes for advisers, compliance teams, and ultimately the people they serve.

Benefits

What We Offer

• Remote-first working across the UK.
• Work abroad policy for when you want a change of scenery.
• Co-working spaces available if you want an office buzz sometimes.
• 34 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays) and your birthday off.
• Company-wide off-sites (yes, karaoke may happen).
• Optional Personal Development Plan.
• Flexible benefits platform: you choose the benefits that matter most to you (not the company).
• Protection essentials, because we know they matter - Life Insurance, Income protection, critical illness cover, Pension (up to 5% matched employer contribution and optional increased contributions).
• Private health- and dental care for your peace of mind.
• Potential share options, have a stake in what you’re building.
• Enhanced family leave.

Join Us in Making a Difference

At Aveni, we believe that diversity drives innovation. We're committed to building a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve and creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work. If you're passionate about leveraging technology to drive positive change and want to be part of a team that's shaping the future of financial services, we'd love to hear from you. We know that some people are likely to only apply where they meet 100% of requirements, but we’d like to hear from you anyway. Apply now to join us on our mission to transform the financial services industry through AI!