Head of Engineering (Founding)

Hanbuc, an AI-native clinical platform for ADHD and autism assessment, and the foundation of a mental health operating system. We're founded and clinically led by practising NHS psychiatrists, backed by a £1M seed round, and building for real clinical use rather than wellness-adjacent software.

Horizon one: fix assessment. UK adult ADHD and autism services have waiting lists measured in years, and clinicians spend a large share of every assessment on structured documentation that AI can now do properly. Hanbuc runs the full pathway: digital screening and rating scales, collateral information from parents and teachers, and an ambient-AI clinical assessment that produces a completed DIVA-5 and draft psychiatric report for clinician review. The clinician stays in the loop and signs everything. We are compressing the admin, not the judgement.

Horizon two: the mental health OS. Assessment is the wedge, not the destination. Every assessment generates structured longitudinal data about a patient that today gets flattened into unsearchable free text. We're building toward a clinical operating system where a patient's history is properly structured and instantly legible to any clinician who picks up their care, spanning diagnosis, treatment, risk and follow-up rather than a single episode. The gap between what a service knows about a patient and what the clinician in front of them can actually see is where UK mental health care fails hardest. That is the problem we're ultimately here to solve.

You'd be our second engineering hire and the person who owns how this gets built. Early on that means writing most of the code yourself: LLM pipelines with real evaluation discipline, a secure clinical data layer, and the assessment workflow end to end. It also means making the architectural decisions that determine whether horizon two is possible. The data model for the longitudinal record is being designed now, inside horizon one. Within 12 months it means hiring and leading a small team, and owning our technical assurance posture for the NHS: ISO 27001, DSPT, DTAC, and the DCB0129 clinical risk process alongside our Clinical Safety Officer.

This is a genuine ground-floor role with founding-level equity. The CTO title is on the table on a defined milestone. We

What you'll do

Own architecture and ship production code across the platform
Build LLM pipelines for clinical summarisation, structured extraction and ambient transcription, with evaluation harnesses rather than vibes
Design the longitudinal clinical data model that horizon two depends on
Build a data layer that stands up to NHS scrutiny: UK-hosted, encrypted, auditable, least-privilege
Drive our security and clinical safety compliance work with our clinical team
Hire and lead the first two to three engineers

What we're looking for

Deep hands-on backend and cloud experience; you still ship
Real production LLM work, including evaluation and failure-mode handling
Experience building software in a regulated environment (healthcare, fintech, or similar) where audit and evidence mattered
Someone who can design for a platform while shipping a product, and knows the difference
Comfort with ambiguity and direct clinical collaboration
Motivated by equity and ownership over title and cash

Nice to have

Healthcare or medical device background (HIPAA, ABDM, CE marking, FDA)
Health data interoperability: FHIR, HL7, or equivalent
Speech-to-text or ambient documentation systems
Experience taking a product through a security certification from scratch

Remote within India, with a preference for Bengaluru or Hyderabad for periodic in-person work.

Work experience: 6+ years
Skills: Python, TypeScript, AWS, PostgreSQL, LLM / GenAI, RAG, System Architecture, Platform Architecture, Data Modelling, FHIR / HL7, Healthcare IT, HIPAA, Information Security, API Development, Engineering Management, Startup Experience