AI & dataPermanent
Head of Clinical AI
Own the clinical safety case for AI features inside a regulated care pathway.
- Location
- London
- Salary
- £130k – £155k
Posted 1 week ago
Digital health jobs in the UK
Digital health hiring in the UK has moved past the growth-at-any-cost phase, and the roles that survived are the ones closest to the care pathway.
Clinical, product, commercial and AI roles across UK digital health and health tech, in organisations where regulation is part of the product.
What these roles pay
Indicative UK ranges from live Scale Health mandates, not published pay scales. Always check what the rate includes before comparing it to anything else.
Head of clinical, digital provider
£95,000 to £135,000
Owns pathway design and clinical workforce
Product manager, clinical products
£70,000 to £100,000
Higher with regulated device or AI experience
Clinical AI lead
£110,000 to £150,000
Model evaluation, safety case and clinical validation
Commercial director, health tech
£100,000 to £140,000 base
Plus variable, PMI, employer and NHS channels
Medical Director, health tech
£140,000 to £200,000
Often four days, sometimes fractional at £900 to £1,400 per day
Live roles in this area
What the market corrected
UK digital health hiring reset hard between 2023 and 2025. What did not survive was headcount distant from either clinical delivery or revenue: large undifferentiated product teams, growth roles with no channel specificity, and clinical advisory posts with no operational accountability.
What did survive, and what is hiring now, sits close to the pathway. Clinicians who can run a service. Product people who understand regulated release cycles. Commercial leaders who have closed with PMI, employers or the NHS specifically. AI people who can hold a safety case.
The regulated part is the differentiator
A product manager from consumer software can learn a health domain. What takes longer is internalising that a release can be a clinical risk event, that a UX change may need a safety case update, and that a feature flag rollout has a duty of candour dimension if it goes wrong.
That is why UK digital health employers pay a premium for regulated-domain experience, and why candidates crossing in from adjacent regulated sectors, fintech, aviation, pharma, transfer better than candidates crossing in from consumer tech.
Where clinical and commercial meet
The hardest roles to fill in UK digital health are the hybrid ones. A Medical Director who can hold a P&L conversation. A commercial director who can survive a clinical veto without treating it as an obstacle. A clinical operations lead who can forecast capacity and defend it to a board.
These profiles are rare because the career paths that produce them are accidental. Scale Health spends most of its search time on exactly this intersection, and it is why we assess against clinical and commercial competence separately rather than as one score.
AI in UK health is a governance job first
Almost every AI role we handle in regulated UK health is constrained by the safety case, the evaluation standard and the deployment defence, not by modelling capability. Candidates who lead with model architecture and cannot discuss clinical evaluation do not get through second stage.
The strongest profile currently is someone with genuine ML literacy who is energised rather than frustrated by clinical risk management. That person is scarce, and UK employers are paying £110,000 to £150,000 for them at lead level.
Equity, stage and what to check
Digital health equity is worth interrogating. Ask for the strike price, the last round's preference structure and the runway. A large option grant in a company with three times liquidation preference and nine months of cash is a smaller number than it looks.
Stage matters more than sector here. Series A digital health is a fundamentally different job from a scaled provider with an NHS contract, and candidates who move between them without adjusting expectations tend to be the ones who leave inside a year.
How Scale Health handles digital health mandates
Clinical, product, commercial, governance and AI mandates across the same provider set
Stage, runway and funding position stated openly on every brief
Channel experience verified before commercial introductions, PMI, employer, NHS and D2C
Board and NED introductions where the organisation needs clinical accountability at that level
Common questions
- What jobs are available in UK digital health?
- The main clusters are clinical delivery and clinical operations inside digital providers, clinical leadership such as Medical and Clinical Director roles, product and engineering on regulated clinical products, commercial roles selling into PMI, employer, NHS and direct to consumer channels, and governance, clinical safety and AI assurance roles.
- Do you need NHS experience to work in digital health?
- Not for most product, commercial and engineering roles, though understanding NHS procurement is close to essential for NHS-facing commercial positions. Clinical roles require the relevant UK registration. Regulated-domain experience of any kind transfers better than consumer technology experience.
- How much do digital health jobs pay in the UK?
- Indicative ranges are £70,000 to £100,000 for product managers on clinical products, £95,000 to £135,000 for heads of clinical, £110,000 to £150,000 for clinical AI leads, and £140,000 to £200,000 for Medical Directors. Equity is common but should be assessed against strike price, preference structure and runway.
- Is digital health still hiring in the UK?
- Yes, but selectively. Hiring has concentrated on roles close to clinical delivery, revenue or regulatory assurance. Undifferentiated product, growth and advisory headcount contracted sharply and has not returned.
Tell us what you are looking for
Scale Health briefs every mandate honestly, including the parts a job advert leaves out. Register once and we will only come to you when something genuinely fits.
How we work on these searchesRelated specialisms
Clinical safety officer jobs
Clinical safety officer roles across health tech, digital health and AI-enabled providers, permanent, fractional and portfolio.
View rolesClinical governance lead jobs
Governance leads and heads of clinical governance for providers building a real function rather than inheriting one.
View rolesConsultant psychiatrist jobs
Consultant psychiatry roles in independent and digital providers, where the caseload, supervision load and reporting SLA are stated up front.
View rolesHiring instead?
Need this capability, not this job?
Scale Health builds clinical, commercial and leadership benches for regulated UK health providers. Tell us the constraint and we will tell you honestly whether we can shift it.