Hesta is creating a new benchmark in women’s health, delivering exceptional care at every life stage. As we advance towards this goal, we are committed to closing the women’s health gap, beginning with pregnancy and postpartum as our initial focus.

75 million years of women’s lives are lost every year due to poor health or early death. This gap limits potential, drives inequality, and reflects a healthcare system that wasn’t built for women. We are changing that.

The Opportunity

Hesta is building a new model of women’s healthcare, and our first mission is to reimagine care for mothers through compassionate care, clinical excellence, and technology. 

Today, postnatal care is fragmented, reactive, and often fails to identify ongoing health needs. We are developing a clinically-validated, digital-first assessment and triage system designed to identify physical, mental, and longer-term health risks earlier, and route women and birthing parents into appropriate care.

We are looking for a Data Scientist (fixed term contract) to deliver the technical feasibility work within an Innovate UK–funded feasibility study assessing whether real-world data can support clinical triage and predictive modelling for postnatal conditions, and ultimately whether this model can scale. 

This is a hands-on role working directly with founders, clinicians, and technical team members. 

What You’ll Do

You will lead the data and technical feasibility work package, including:

• Define and execute extraction of a retrospective primary care cohort

• Clean, structure, and validate datasets from both product and NHS sources

• Identify early clinical signals at the 6–8 week postnatal check that predict longer-term conditions

• Apply appropriate statistical and epidemiological methods (e.g. regression, survival analysis)

• Evaluate data quality, completeness, and limitations, and recommend improvements

• Work closely with clinicians to ensure outputs reflect real clinical reasoning

• Handle all data responsibly and within NHS information governance and UK GDPR requirements. 

• Produce clear, well-documented outputs: clean datasets, analysis code, and a final feasibility report that a clinician and a funder can both read and trust

• Move quickly. We’re a small team with a fixed timeline and genuine ambitions — we need someone who can hit the ground running

What You’ll Bring 

• Hands-on experience working with real-world health data, ideally GP EHR data from systems like EMIS or SystemOne

• Strong skills in Python or R — we don’t mind which, but you should be genuinely proficient, not just familiar

• A solid grounding in retrospective cohort design and the statistical approaches that go with it: regression, survival analysis, handling missingness and confounders

• Enough understanding of NHS information governance to work with pseudonymised patient data correctly and confidently

• The ability to explain what you found and why it matters to people who aren’t data scientists — that includes our clinicians, project team, and eventually our funders

• A proactive mindset. We won’t be managing your day-to-day. You’ll need to spot the problems, flag them early and propose solutions

• Genuine curiosity about the clinical questions behind the data, not just the method

• Experience with postnatal, maternal or women’s health data specifically

• Familiarity with SNOMED CT or Read codes used in primary care records

• Written up findings before — internal reports, publications, or anything that shows you can go from analysis to narrative

This role sits inside our Innovate UK-funded feasibility study (H2 2025 – H2 2026). The retrospective analysis runs roughly for six months across six structured phases: set-up and approvals, data extraction, cleaning and variable derivation, analysis, clinical validation, and final report. You’ll be working with our project manager and clinical leads throughout, with direct access to research and data teams at site level.

The study is designed to answer a genuine question: can primary care data support predictive modelling for postnatal conditions? Your work will directly shape that answer — and how we build Hesta from here.

The Practicalities

• Contract: Fixed-term, part-time (hours flexible, on average 2 days per week across the period)

• Duration: 6 months (some flexibility in duration, and there may be other opportunities to follow - not guaranteed)

• Location: London

• Start: ASAP

Company Benefits

• A front-row seat in an early-stage, mission-driven company to help build the backbone of a healthcare service designed specifically for women.

• Join a small, mission-driven team where your contributions have immediate impact.

• Direct exposure to building a real health economic case for health system adoption

• Close mentorship from founders with experience across NHS, Babylon Health, and scaling health tech businesses

• Opportunity to work on a live, funded project with real impact

• Flexible, hybrid, working; our team work is based on the job that needs to be done, not office facetime

• Office facilities: Spacious working space, with other innovators in Victoria, bike storage, changing facilities and a healthy supply of tea/coffee