Anathem
Head of Engineering & Applied AI
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About Anathem
Anathem builds AI systems that frontline professionals rely on to protect vulnerable people across NHS mental health, policing and social care. Our platform automates the clinical documentation, statutory reports and legal case files that consume 40–70% of a frontline professional's week — the reason a child can wait four years for an Autism assessment, and officers can't keep pace with case backlogs critical to protecting victims.
At CNWL CAMHS, clinicians using Anathem nearly doubled service delivery and cut the neurodevelopmental waiting list from 600 children to 80 in under a year — results peer-reviewed in the British Journal of Psychiatry: 17% higher productivity, 61% less admin time, zero medical escalations. In policing, we're the only AI platform with Crown Prosecution Service approval — the sole formal recognition of AI output as admissible in UK criminal proceedings. Our Norfolk & Suffolk deployment cut 78 minutes off every Domestic Violence Protection Notice with an 80% court grant rate, and in the Home Office C820 benchmark we recorded a 1% hallucination rate while being the only tool able to produce complete DVPN sets.
We process tens of thousands of consultations monthly across multiple NHS Trusts, private providers and police forces. We're an MHRA Class I medical device (Class IIa in progress), ISO 27001 certified and NHS AVT Register listed, as well as having Crown Prosecution Service sign off for our outputs to be put in front of a court of law.
As we scale, reliability, security and engineering maturity matter as much as speed. That's what this role exists to solve.
The Opportunity
We're looking for an exceptional Head of Engineering & Applied AI to become the CTO's technical and operational deputy and help lead Anathem's next stage of growth.
You'll own two connected areas: the day-to-day effectiveness of our engineering organisation, and the development of safe, clinically grounded AI systems for healthcare, policing and other high-stakes services — leading delivery from requirements through design, evaluation, deployment and production monitoring, and owning parts of our applied AI roadmap across LLM orchestration, clinical NLP, evaluation, grounding, post-training and human-centred AI.
This isn't purely managerial or purely research-focused. You'll stay hands-on, write and review code, lead architecture and personally drive our most ambitious AI initiatives — but be measured on the effectiveness of the organisation and quality of what the team ships, not just your own output. There's a clear path toward VP Engineering or CTO-level responsibility as we grow.
What You'll Own
Applied AI & LLM Innovation
- Define and deliver Anathem's applied AI strategy. Lead initiatives from research through evaluation, deployment and production improvement; explore orchestration, retrieval, grounding, structured generation and agentic workflows where they create real value; design evaluation frameworks covering factuality, robustness, safety, bias, latency and cost; build evaluation datasets and regression suites; establish LLMOps practice; evaluate new foundation models; work with clinicians on requirements; and lead select NHS/university collaborations, backed by strong privacy and regulatory evidence.
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Engineering Leadership & Delivery
- Act as senior engineering leader beneath the CTO. Translate priorities into technical plans and milestones; coordinate delivery across backend, frontend, mobile, infrastructure and data; run planning, stand-ups and reviews; maintain visibility into capacity and risk; balance urgent customer needs against platform investment; represent engineering in product and commercial discussions; and run operations independently when the CTO is unavailable — building delivery that doesn't depend on individual heroics.
Architecture & Research-to-Production
- Lead major architectural decisions; mature experimental work into robust, secure, observable systems; define boundaries between research and production engineering; ensure AI pipelines are reproducible, testable and auditable; improve platform modularity; lead work on structured clinical data and integrations; and stay hands-on for high-risk or strategically important work.
Production Quality, Security & Reliability
- Define and uphold production-readiness standards; establish pragmatic pre-merge testing and security controls; hold AI changes to the same rigour as conventional software; strengthen test coverage and observability; own delivery of security findings and pen-test actions; and lead incident response and blameless post-incident reviews so releases stay predictable and low-drama.
Team Leadership & Culture
- Provide technical direction, mentoring and feedback; set clear expectations on ownership and quality; help engineers grow into independent decision-makers; build a culture of curiosity and evidence-led decisions; support hiring; shape future team structure; and take on direct line management over time.
Success Looks Like
Within 12 months: delivery no longer depends on the CTO coordinating routine work, under a clear, consistently followed operating model. Priorities translate into credible plans with visible ownership and risk, and releases are predictable, well-tested and low-drama. Repositories have clear ownership and readiness standards, with automated checks catching avoidable issues before production. AI/LLM changes go through repeatable evaluation and regression frameworks, with a clear model/prompt/evaluation lifecycle from development to monitoring. High-risk technical debt and security findings are addressed via a visible programme, and incidents produce documented, systemic learning. Engineers get regular direction and development support, technical risk and capacity are visible to leadership, and the platform supports new customers and workflows without overhead scaling linearly. You can confidently run engineering operations in the CTO's absence, and at least one major applied AI initiative has reached evaluated, production-ready use.
Who We're Looking For
Core experience: Strong hands-on ML/NLP/LLM systems experience and advanced Python. Experience across the AI lifecycle — research, prototyping, evaluation, integration, deployment, monitoring — with a solid grasp of LLM systems and failure modes. Experience with grounding, structured outputs, retrieval or model adaptation, and strong fundamentals in testing, code review and architecture. Experience designing evaluation pipelines, operating production systems, and owning multi-stakeholder initiatives, plus strong communication and some experience mentoring engineers. Formal line management is a plus; we're equally open to senior technical candidates ready to grow into people leadership.
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Particularly valuable: Clinical NLP or healthcare data; mental health documentation workflows; post-training, fine-tuning or RLHF; expert AI evaluation, factuality or safety evaluation; RAG or tool-using LLM systems; MLOps/LLMOps; EHR or healthcare interoperability; peer-reviewed research with practical implementation; NHS or university collaboration; another regulated domain with sensitive data under strict governance; Azure and DevOps; FastAPI, Next.js, React or TypeScript; leading incidents; and hiring at an early-stage company. We don't expect deep expertise in every area.
You'll probably be a great fit if you: want to stay technically ambitious while owning a team's outcomes; are motivated by turning research into real-world impact; move comfortably between papers, architecture and delivery plans; know when advanced AI is justified versus when simpler engineering is safer; move quickly without getting careless; decide well under incomplete requirements; can constructively challenge senior stakeholders; fix systems rather than assign blame when things fail; and want to help shape an organisation, not just inherit one.
Why This Is a Rare Opportunity
You'll lead applied AI development in live healthcare and public-sector environments — real systems used by frontline professionals, not demos or benchmarks — shaping both AI strategy and engineering organisation while working directly with clinicians, NHS organisations, police forces and academic collaborators, with autonomy over which emerging techniques are genuinely useful.
What We Offer
A high-impact leadership role with genuine ownership over delivery, architecture, platform quality and applied AI innovation, working closely with the CTO, founders, clinicians and customers. Exposure to complex challenges across mental health, healthcare, policing and public-sector AI, and real influence over the engineering organisation's future. Hybrid and flexible working, competitive salary and meaningful equity, wellbeing benefits, and a clear path into broader executive technology leadership.
Why This Role Matters
Anathem has reached a point where strong individual engineering isn't enough on its own. We need to turn technical expertise into a resilient organisation — one that innovates quickly, holds high standards, and reliably supports systems used in sensitive, high-stakes environments. You'll help decide not only what we build next, but how effectively we build, evaluate, deploy and operate it — turning AI research into dependable product capability, keeping releases predictable, catching risks internally, and letting the organisation scale without leaning on founder heroics.
If you take pride in combining ambitious AI engineering with disciplined delivery, and want to help build the technology and the organisation behind it, we'd love to hear from you.
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