Clinical Entity and Natural Language Programming (NLP) Service Lead

Overview

In this role you lead the Clinical Informatics Entity and NLP Service at SLaM, shaping how clinical text and structured data are extracted for patient care and research. You will drive development of NLP pipelines and the MH-TAC cloud service for NHS trusts and universities, balancing clinical impact with scalable, cost-effective delivery. You’ll collaborate with clinicians, researchers and industry partners to translate complex data into actionable information. The opportunity combines cutting-edge NLP with leadership to advance mental health informatics at scale.

Pay / Benefits

• flexible working
• permanent contract
• competitive salary (Band 8a)
• HCAS included in salary
• opportunity to work across NHS and university partnerships

Responsibilities

• Oversee the SLAM Clinical Informatics Entity and NLP Service and policy implementation
• Maintain ITIL-aligned service model and operational governance
• Line manage the technical developer and service administrator
• Engage with senior clinicians and IoPPN academics to define information extraction needs
• Lead development of NLP pipelines to extract complex clinical entities
• Supervise training of staff on new extraction methods
• Implement DevOps and change management aligned with SLAM policies
• Manage deployment and performance reporting of pipelines
• Ensure services are cost-effective and budget-compliant
• Coordinate testing for clinical and research outputs and keep cloud infrastructure operational
• Provide 4th-line support coordination with SLAM technical teams and suppliers
• Lead design and management of the MH-TAC service including commercial, governance and budgeting
• Foster relationships with MH-TAC partners and customers and develop training materials

Key requirements

• Extensive NLP development and deployment experience using AI in clinical text
• Experience with SQL Server (t-SQL, stored procedures)
• Direct experience with NHS Mental Health clinical data
• Experience in clinical and academic environments and communicating with diverse stakeholders
• Proven ability to develop/deploy technical services with DevOps and ITIL-aligned processes
• Understanding of performance testing for clinical entity extraction (precision/recall)
• Line management experience (desirable)

• Leadership and team motivation
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Customer-focused collaboration with cross-disciplinary teams
• NLP techniques and AI methods for information extraction
• Cloud infrastructure for NLP services
• DevOps and change management in a healthcare setting

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