Self-employed independent contractor, fixed-term (IR35 status to be assessed)
Initial term: 3 months with extention option
Fee: £500 per calendar month, inclusive of VAT (£1,500 total for Initial Period)
Payment process: Weekly worksheet submitted each Friday, reviewed by following Monday. Monthly invoice paid within 7 days.
Location Remote (UK).
Working pattern: Self-directed hours. Daily standup via Google Meet, 12:00 GMT/BST, Monday to Friday
Tools: Jira, GitLab, Confluence
About Ladybird
Ladybird is a Manchester-based healthtech startup building AI-powered products for NHS GP practices.
Our first product, inCall, is an AI-powered NHS receptionist designed to answer GP patient calls instantly, verify patient identity against NHS records, and intelligently route calls without requiring a human receptionist to answer first.
We are currently building the Stage 1 proof of concept of a four-stage product roadmap. This first stage focuses on secure patient verification and call handling:
- Patient calls a GP practice
- AI receptionist answers immediately
- Patient identity is verified against NHS records via FHIR APIs
- Caller is securely returned to the appropriate queue
Future stages will introduce AI triage, clinical routing, and fully autonomous call handling.
This is a production-minded NHS platform, not a demo environment. Reliability, security, and operational resilience are fundamental.
The Role
We are looking for a Senior Technical Lead with direct experience operating NHS, emergency services, or healthcare-grade telephony platforms.
You will own the technical delivery of the inCall proof of concept, overseeing specialist contractors across AI and cloud infrastructure. You will provide architecture leadership, technical assurance, delivery management, and act as the primary technical escalation point for Ladybird.
This is a technical leadership and oversight role, not a hands-on engineering build position.
You will be responsible for ensuring the platform is architecturally sound, production-ready, and aligned with the standards expected of an NHS-facing system.
Key ResponsibilitiesTechnical Leadership
- Own the overall technical architecture for the inCall POC
- Review and challenge technical decisions across telephony, cloud, and AI workstreams
- Identify technical risks before they become delivery or reliability issues
- Maintain architecture documentation and technical decision records
- Act as the senior technical point of contact for Ladybird
Delivery Management
- Manage Jira delivery across multiple specialist contractors
- Define monthly milestones, deliverables, and acceptance criteria
- Review contractor outputs and provide technical sign-off
- Resolve blockers between engineering workstreams
- Communicate delivery risks and recommendations to stakeholders
Telephony Architecture Oversight
You will oversee a platform built around:
- 3CX telephony
- SIP trunk connectivity
- FreeSWITCH on AWS EC2
- NHS healthcare call workflows
You should be able to critically review:
- SIP signalling and troubleshooting
- RTP media handling
- NAT traversal
- Codec negotiation
- One-way audio issues
- PBX failover and resilience strategies
- Call surge behaviour and degradation handling
Required Experience
This role requires proven experience with live NHS or emergency telephony systems.
You must have experience building, operating, or leading technical delivery for systems such as:
- NHS 999 or 111 platforms
- GP surgery telephony systems
- NHS crisis or triage contact centres
- Emergency services communications platforms
- Healthcare call routing platforms where downtime has operational or clinical impact
Candidates without direct NHS or emergency telephony experience will not be considered.
Cloud Infrastructure Experience
You do not need to build the AWS environment yourself, but you must be able to review architecture decisions and identify risks.
You should understand:
- AWS VPC architecture
- EC2 deployments and availability zones
- Security groups and networking
- Lambda and API Gateway
- CloudWatch monitoring and audit logging
- Infrastructure-as-code reviews (Terraform)
- CI/CD deployment risks
- NHS data handling requirements
Experience with NHS APIs, including FHIR-based integrations, is highly desirable.
AI / LLM Technical Oversight
The AI Engineer will be developing a fine-tuned LLaMA 3 8B model for the voice platform.
You should be able to:
- Review AI architecture and deployment decisions
- Challenge synthetic dataset design and evaluation methods
- Assess model readiness for production use
- Understand latency, accuracy, confidence scoring, and fallback strategies
- Identify risks associated with AI in NHS patient-facing workflows
Hands-on model training experience is not required, but strong technical judgement is essential.
What You Will Deliver
Month 1 Architecture & Delivery Setup
- Establish the overall POC architecture
- Validate telephony infrastructure design
- Review SIP trunk and FreeSWITCH deployment
- Create and prioritise Jira delivery plans
- Define acceptance criteria with contractors
- Document architecture decisions
Month 2 Delivery Oversight
- Oversee telephony, AI, and cloud delivery
- Review NHS data handling and audit logging approach
- Assess AI model development progress
- Resolve cross-team technical blockers
- Approve monthly delivery outcomes
Month 3 POC Completion
- Lead the end-to-end POC demonstration
- Review CTI integration and mock EMIS workflows
- Produce a production migration roadmap
- Sign off final technical documentation
Essential Requirements
You should have:
- 5+ years of production engineering experience
- Hands-on NHS, emergency, or healthcare telephony experience
- Strong SIP/PBX knowledge
- Experience with FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, or equivalent platforms
- Experience leading technical delivery across multiple specialists
- Experience managing delivery through Jira or similar tools
- Understanding of regulated healthcare environments
- Ability to communicate technical risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders
Desirable Experience
Strong candidates may also have:
- Telecoms carrier or NHS network background
- Experience modernising NHS GP telephony systems
- Knowledge of platforms such as Surgery Connect, Avaya, or Genesys in NHS environments
- NHS clinical safety or architecture review experience
- Familiarity with NHS IG requirements
- SC Clearance
Contract Details
Engagement: Fixed-term independent contractor
Initial term: 3 months
Location: Remote UK, with occasional attendance in Manchester
Working pattern: Self-directed hours with daily stand-up at 12:00 GMT/BST (Monday–Friday)
Tools: Jira, GitLab, Confluence
Reporting to: Ladybird technical leadership
Rate: £500 per calendar month inclusive of VAT (£1,500 total initial term)
Payment is based on reviewed weekly worksheets and monthly acceptance of agreed deliverables.
Extension beyond the initial term may be agreed by mutual written consent.
This Role Is Not For You If:
- You have not operated live NHS or emergency telephony systems
- Your experience is limited to general cloud infrastructure
- You are looking for a hands-on developer role
- You have only worked with commercial contact centres outside healthcare
- You are not comfortable owning technical sign-off and delivery accountability
The Opportunity
This is the first stage of a major NHS AI telephony platform.
The Senior Technical Lead who successfully delivers this POC will be strongly positioned to continue leading future stages of development, including AI triage, clinical routing, and autonomous call handling.
You will help establish the technical foundation for a platform designed to transform how GP practices manage patient access.
Apply with details of your NHS telephony experience, the platforms you have worked with, and your role in delivering them.
Pay: £500.00-£3,000.00 per month
Work Location: Remote
