Senior Technical Lead NHS AI Telephony Platform

Salary: £6,000 - 36,000 per year

Requirements:

• We require 5+ years of production engineering experience.
• We require hands-on NHS, emergency services, or healthcare telephony experience.
• We require strong SIP/PBX knowledge.
• We require experience with FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, or equivalent platforms.
• We require experience leading technical delivery across multiple specialists.
• We require experience managing delivery through Jira or similar tools.
• We require an understanding of regulated healthcare environments.
• We require the ability to communicate technical risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• We require direct experience operating live NHS or emergency telephony systems.
• We require experience building, operating, or leading technical delivery for NHS 999 or 111 platforms, GP surgery telephony systems, NHS crisis or triage contact centres, emergency services communications platforms, or healthcare call routing platforms where downtime has operational or clinical impact.
• We value experience with AWS VPC architecture, EC2 deployments, availability zones, security groups, networking, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudWatch, Terraform reviews, CI/CD deployment risks, and NHS data handling requirements.
• We value experience with NHS APIs, including FHIR-based integrations.
• We value the ability to review AI architecture and deployment decisions, assess production readiness, and identify risks in NHS patient-facing workflows.
• We value telecoms carrier or NHS network background, NHS GP telephony modernization, Surgery Connect, Avaya, or Genesys experience in NHS environments, NHS clinical safety or architecture review experience, familiarity with NHS IG requirements, and SC Clearance.

Responsibilities:

• We will have you own the overall technical architecture for the inCall proof of concept.
• We will have you review and challenge technical decisions across telephony, cloud, and AI workstreams.
• We will have you identify technical risks before they become delivery or reliability issues.
• We will have you maintain architecture documentation and technical decision records.
• We will have you act as the senior technical point of contact for Ladybird.
• We will have you manage Jira delivery across multiple specialist contractors.
• We will have you define monthly milestones, deliverables, and acceptance criteria.
• We will have you review contractor outputs and provide technical sign-off.
• We will have you resolve blockers between engineering workstreams.
• We will have you communicate delivery risks and recommendations to stakeholders.
• We will have you oversee telephony architecture built around 3CX telephony, SIP trunk connectivity, FreeSWITCH on AWS EC2, and NHS healthcare call workflows.
• We will have you critically review SIP signalling and troubleshooting, RTP media handling, NAT traversal, codec negotiation, one-way audio issues, PBX failover and resilience strategies, and call surge behaviour and degradation handling.
• We will have you establish the overall proof-of-concept architecture in month 1, oversee delivery in month 2, and lead the end-to-end proof-of-concept demonstration and roadmap in month 3.

Technologies:

• AI
• API
• AWS
• Lambda
• Asterisk
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• CloudWatch
• Confluence
• EC2
• Genesys
• GitLab
• JIRA
• NAT
• Network
• Security
• Terraform
• LLM
• Model Training

More:

We are Ladybird, a Manchester-based healthtech startup building AI-powered products for NHS GP practices. Our first product, inCall, is an AI-powered NHS receptionist that answers GP patient calls instantly, verifies patient identity against NHS records, and routes calls without requiring a human receptionist to answer first. We are building the first stage of a four-stage product roadmap focused on secure patient verification and call handling, with future stages covering AI triage, clinical routing, and fully autonomous call handling. This is a production-minded NHS platform where reliability, security, and operational resilience are fundamental. We are offering a fixed-term independent contractor engagement, initially for 3 months with an extension option, working remotely in the UK with occasional attendance in Manchester. The role follows self-directed hours with a daily stand-up at 12:00 GMT/BST, Monday to Friday, using Jira, GitLab, and Confluence.

last updated 31 week of 2026