PhD and Post Doctoral Researcher

About us

We exist to simplify healthcare and improve lives by making care feel instant, intelligent and human.

HealthHero is Europe’s largest digital health provider, delivering 4 million consultations per year. But we’re just getting started. We’ve built a seamless digital clinic that brings body and mind together — from GP appointments and mental health support to long-term condition management. By sitting behind the world’s leading insurers and employers and supporting public health systems, we make it easier for millions of people to get the care they need, exactly when they need it.

We are a high-growth, capital-backed business with a sophisticated scale strategy. Our team is a unique blend of digital-native pioneers, management consultants, creatives and industry-leading clinical experts.

We aren’t just digitising appointments; we’re building the next generation of healthcare. We’re creating an AI-powered, always-on ecosystem that learns from every interaction to shift the needle from reactive treatment to proactive, sustainable health.

At HealthHero, we are digital when it should be and human where it counts. Join us, and help build a next generation health system the world is waiting for.

Graph Optimisation for Clinical Symptom Triage

Minimum of 6 months I 2-3 days per week

Context

HealthHero is Europe's largest digital-first healthcare provider, with a library of clinically governed symptom-assessment algorithms developed over two decades. We are now developing our agentic layer across a variety of use cases.

Our deterministic clinical algorithms are represented as large decision graphs, explored non-linearly as information arrives out of order. Optimising how these graphs are explored, ranked, and compressed is the subject of this position.

Research directions:

The successful candidate will shape their own project within this space. Indicative open problems:

• Path ranking under partial information: weighting candidate paths by clinical relevance given accumulated context, reducing the search space without weakening safety guarantees.

• Question economy as an optimisation objective: formalising next-question selection as uncertainty reduction: information-theoretic or decision-theoretic approaches to asking the fewest questions that safely reach a disposition.

• Semantic compression of question sets: principled merging of functionally redundant questions across concurrent candidate paths, with exact decomposition back into the underlying deterministic logic.

• Asynchronous exploration of sequential decision structures: formal treatment of multi-path, out-of-order exploration in decision structures originally designed for linear, synchronous use.

What the position offers:

• A clinically governed algorithm corpus refined over 20+ years, thousands of structured question–answer pairs, and an established regression baseline — a rare empirical foundation.

• A direct route from research results into a regulated, patient-facing product, with engineering and clinical teams as active collaborators.

• Co-supervision between [academic supervisor] and HealthHero's technical leadership; support for publication and conference attendance.

Candidate profile:

Essential:

• Strong background in computer science, mathematics, operations research or a related discipline (Master's level for PhD entry; PhD in a relevant area for postdoctoral appointment).

• Solid grounding in graph theory and graph algorithms.

• Programming proficiency sufficient for empirical work on real systems (e.g. Python; graph database experience such as Neo4j or comparable is an advantage).

• Ability to reason rigorously about correctness and edge cases

Desirable:

• Exposure to information theory, decision theory, probabilistic inference or planning under uncertainty.

• Interest in safety-critical or regulated domains; familiarity with clinical decision support is welcome but not required.

• Experience collaborating with industry or working with production datasets.

Closing date: Monday 21 September (9am)

Pay rate: competitive market rate

Equality, Inclusivity and Diversity

In line with our commitment to Equality, Inclusivity and Diversity, we welcome and encourage applications from all suitably qualified candidates from all backgrounds. We are committed to supporting and promoting equality and diversity and aim to establish an inclusive working environment. As such, we welcome diverse applications from candidates irrespective of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (including colour, nationality, ethnic and national origin), religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

We are a certified Disability Confident Employer and are committed to affording equal opportunities for candidates with disabilities or special needs. Should you require any reasonable adjustments to be made at any part of your application process, please let us know by contacting us at recruitment-team@healthhero.com