Healthcare & Life Sciences Executive Search for AI Leaders

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Healthcare & Life Sciences AI Executive Search

Executive search and specialist recruitment for the AI and data leaders that healthcare, biotech, digital health and life sciences organisations build around, run from London, New York and Berlin. AI is moving into clinical workflows, drug development, diagnostics, research and healthcare operations: environments where technical capability alone isn’t enough.

In short: Banba is an executive search firm, run from London, New York and Berlin, that finds senior AI and data leaders for healthcare and life sciences organisations: Chief AI Officers, Heads of AI and Machine Learning, Chief Data Officers and the clinical AI, data and governance leaders around them, for healthtech, digital health, biotech, pharma and medtech companies.

Who we work with

Healthtech, digital health and techbio scale-ups, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, medtech and diagnostics businesses, and health systems building AI capability for the first time. The people hiring are usually a founder, CEO, CTO, Chief Medical Officer or head of data who needs a leader, or a team, that can make AI work in a regulated setting.

What usually triggers the hire

A raise or a pivot. New funding, or a platform moving from research into product, creates a first Head of AI or Chief Data Officer role.
Pilot to production. Models that worked in a pilot now have to run inside clinical, laboratory or operational workflows, safely and at scale.
Regulation arrives. Medical-device rules, the EU AI Act and clinical evidence requirements need someone who can own AI governance, not just build models.

Roles we search for

Chief AI Officer, Head of AI and Chief Data Officer
Heads of Machine Learning and Clinical AI Engineering
AI diagnostics and medical imaging: computer vision, digital pathology and imaging AI leaders
Drug discovery: computational biology, computational chemistry and machine-learning leaders
Clinical development: clinical data science and real-world evidence leaders (not patient recruitment)
Clinical deployment and health data: clinical AI product, health data engineering and AI governance leads

Where sector knowledge matters, and where it doesn’t

Some capabilities transfer well from other industries: platform engineering, MLOps, general data leadership. Others don’t: clinical safety, regulatory evidence, laboratory data and the realities of health-system procurement. Part of every search is deciding, with you, which parts of the role need someone from the sector and which are better filled from outside it. Each shortlist is then assessed on capability, leadership, execution, judgement, context and motivation. How an executive search works.

What does a healthcare AI executive search firm do?

It finds, assesses and secures the people who set and run AI in a healthcare or life sciences organisation. The work differs from general technology search because the right candidate has to be credible with clinicians, regulators and boards as well as with engineers, and has to make AI work inside clinical, laboratory or regulated workflows.

When should a healthtech or life sciences company use executive search?

When the hire sets strategy or carries regulatory accountability: a first Head of AI or Chief Data Officer after a raise, a leader to move models from pilot into production, or someone to own AI governance as medical-device rules and the EU AI Act apply. For individual specialist hires, a focused recruitment process is usually the better fit, and we run both.

How is Banba different from a generalist life sciences search firm?

Banba specialises in AI and data leadership and applies it to healthcare and life sciences, rather than covering every life sciences function. Searches are founder-led: the person you brief is the person who runs your search.