Senior AI engineer

About this role

WE'RE UNLOCKING ACCESS TO THE NHS, BECAUSE HEALTHCARE IS NOT TRULY FREE UNTIL IT'S TRULY ACCESSIBLE 💙

The world’s best healthcare, for free. It's not a new idea, it's called the NHS. But the largest healthcare provider is fundamentally broken. Patient satisfaction is at an all time low, and the biggest reason cited is lack of access. So we’re on a mission to fix it with technology that actually works.

We're building the front door of UK healthcare, creating a future where one billion NHS appointments are transparent and instantly bookable, and patients are guided to the right service first time using AI.

We're developing critical national infrastructure. Today, 26% of GP practices in England use our patient registration software, while one in five GP practices in London use Bookable https://bookable.health/?utm_source=ashby Search to help new patients find and book appointments seamlessly.

Our latest product, Bookable Navigator, extends this vision by automatically booking appointments for existing patients.

We operate from within a working GP practice in East London 🏥 We're backed by Y Combinator, Innovate UK and the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, and were previously ranked the 8th fastest-growing startup in the UK and 33rd fastest-growing in Europe 🚀

⛩️ OUR PRINCIPLES

Exciting challenges lie ahead. Guided by our principles, we’ll meet these challenges with a thoughtful and caring approach. These principles drive everything we do at Healthtech-1:

1. 💙 Care deeply

2. 🏋️‍♀️ Work hard

3. 🤝 Be your word

4. 💬 Trust in radical truth and transparency

5.  🚀 Do your life's best work

6. 🥳 Find the fun

Read more about our principles and our "why" in the Healthtech-1 Handbook https://link.ht1.uk/handbook.

Why this role matters

35% of NHS staff time is spent on admin. That’s the opportunity. Our first product is already used by 26% of GP practices in England, and we’re now scaling a platform that transforms how patients and clinicians interact with healthcare.

We are hiring Senior AI Engineers who have shipped real AI product experiences. We mean people who have built AI products, broken them in production, fixed them, and shipped them to users who depend on the result. Curiosity about AI isn't enough.

The hard problem here is getting AI to reason like a clinician would in high stakes care navigation scenarios. That takes agents doing substantive work, surfaced through interfaces that make their reasoning easy to follow and check.

As a Senior AI Engineer, you’ll own and shape the experiences used every day by patients and clinicians where performance, clarity, and reliability directly impact care.

What you'll own

- End-to-end product features across the frontend, backend, data, and API layers, owned through to production

- AI-powered care navigation: agentic systems, retrieval, tool use, and the evaluation loops that keep them honest

- The integration work that turns model providers and AI tooling into product experiences people can depend on

- Evaluation and feedback systems that make AI behaviour measurable and improvable over time

- Trust surfaces such as provenance, citations, and confidence, rendered so a scientist can check the work behind any answer

- Close work with founders, customers, and domain experts, turning ambiguity into shipped product

- Engineering velocity through automation, AI-assisted development, and internal tooling that lets a small team do the work of a much larger one

Our Tech Stack:

- Fullstack (Backend leaning): React, TypeScript (core focus)

- APIs: Designing and consuming scalable, well-structured services

- Data: Working with production systems and performance considerations

- AI: Integrating modern AI models into real-world healthcare workflows

- Experience in scaling product environments or high-stakes domains (health, finance, infra) is a strong advantage.

We’re based inside a GP practice, so you can walk downstairs and see the real-world impact of your work.

Why join our engineering team:

- Build technology that actually matters at national scale

- Solve complex, meaningful problems with real-world constraints

- Work in a high-performing, product-led team

- Have real ownership, real responsibility, and real impact

What we're looking for:

- At least 5+ years of professional engineering experience, with broad full-stack range

- You've shipped AI features that people rely on, and you can point to them

- You can talk concretely about prompts, evals, failure modes, latency, cost, and the UX tradeoffs of building with language models

- You use AI coding tools fluently and have strong, earned opinions about where they help and where they fall down

- You've come from somewhere that held a high bar, such as FAANG, a top AI lab, or a respected product-engineering environment

- You want more ownership, speed, and upside than those environments tend to offer

- You have strong product taste and can make pragmatic calls without waiting for perfect requirements

💙 A BIT ABOUT US

💙 We’re all NHS staff. We’re inside-outsiders. Trusted with one of the biggest datasets in the world.

🏥 Our office is within a GP practice. This is our unfair advantage. Got a question? Pop down the corridor. Want to learn how your work affects real patients? Pop downstairs to reception.

💪🏼 4 days in the office and 1 day WFH (for most roles). We highly prioritise in-person communication and prefer candidates who want to work 4+ days a week in the office. Our anchor days are Mon, Tues, Thurs and Fri. Homemade breakfast and lunch are on the house every day when you're in the office, ensuring you're fuelled for success!

🌀 We work in growth cycles. Every 8 weeks we do the same set of activities. 1 week outside of Business-as-Usual to research, strategise, plan our work. 7 weeks to knuckle down and deliver it.

🤝 We’re highly collaborative. One of the benefits of a high trust team is we often work…