Available for contract · UK Remote
AI that works in the real world.
Senior AI contractor. PhD. Clinical AI, GenAI systems, and full-stack builds — for health, education, and the rare problem worth solving.
Capabilities
I build GenAI systems that actually get deployed — RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, structured outputs, and the evaluation frameworks that tell you whether they're working. I've been doing this since before the current gold rush.
I've worked inside a clinical AI startup from prototype through to paid trials. I understand the regulatory context (MHRA, NHS governance), the real-world constraints, and the difference between a demo that impresses and a system a clinician will actually trust.
I can take an AI idea from architecture through to a working web application. Python backends, modern JS frontends, data pipelines, knowledge graphs — I've built and shipped all of it, often as a team of one.
Background
My PhD in Evolutionary Computation gave me a grounding in optimisation and search that turns out to be surprisingly useful when building AI systems that need to do more than generate plausible text. I've spent the last fifteen years moving between data science, full-stack development, and — more recently — the fast-moving world of generative AI and agentic systems. I've worked in pre-seed startups, post-acquisition businesses, and everything in between.
Education
Experience
Focus areas
01
Healthcare is where the stakes are real. I'm drawn to problems where AI can reduce clinician burden, surface insights from messy clinical data, or help patients navigate complex systems — and where the regulatory and safety constraints make the engineering genuinely hard.
02
Education sits at the intersection of two things AI is genuinely good at: personalisation at scale, and making sense of complex unstructured data. There's significant work to be done here, and I'm interested in doing it.
03
I've spent years building tools that make sense of job markets, skills data, and career trajectories. It's a domain I know deeply — and one where AI is creating both new possibilities and new responsibilities.
Portfolio
OnVocation
A database of 2M+ tech jobs, mined for skill associations and presented through custom interactive visualisations.
Parkinson's Disease Evaluation
Mobile MVP for clinical-grade pose estimation at Machine Medicine — prototype that underpinned the first round of paid clinical trials.
MemoryJam
A generative AI system for capturing, structuring and enriching family memories across generations. Currently in development.
Testimonials
Bill Fischer CTO at VONQ · Board Advisor · FounderSimon possessed the intellect and creative problem solving abilities required to develop some of the key methods that we use to interrogate/structure/package these datasets into commercial products that we sell globally. He also was able to take very complex technology and make it understandable to a wider group within the company.
Bahul Upadhyaya Innovator, architect, and developerSimon is a conscientious and hard working developer, he is extremely analytical with a keen eye for detail and an ability to grasp complicated concepts with little effort. He is able to work equally alone as with a team and is always active, attentive and productive when working with others. He is very well organised and uses this to effectively focus on the task at hand while still being cognisant of the rest of his work load.
Sanford Dickert Director, Product / Technology @ Kindred Factors · CTO · Director of ProductSimon is a very high-level thinker, bringing about high-level concepts to reality through his artisan coding abilities.
Ray Rafiq Unretiring… · ClientBringing Simon in brought immediate results. Our algorithms weren’t quite right. Simon quickly picked up on both the business logic and how users would behave and made quick headway toward a solution that was elegant and quick to implement.
Contact
I'm currently available for senior AI contract work — particularly in health, education, and adjacent domains. Remote, UK-based. If you have a problem worth solving, I'd like to hear about it.
si@shellsi.com LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/simonhammond