Safe practice manager jobs in Bristol

Every week, people who've fled war, violence and persecution find somewhere to feel safe again - with one of our therapists. We're recruiting self-employed sessional psychotherapists, counsellors and supervisors across Devon, Somerset and Bristol.

We believe everyone deserves the chance to rebuild their life after trauma. We provide free, long-term psychotherapy to refugees, people seeking asylum and people who've experienced trafficking, alongside training and supervision for people working with trauma across the South West. We're a warm, small team, built on the values of Compassion, Collaboration and Courage.

This job is for you if…

• You're a qualified psychotherapist or counsellor with a humanistic and/or integrative training, registered or accredited with a professional body (e.g. UKCP, BACP)
• You care about supporting refugees and people seeking asylum, and can commit to at least two years with us
• For supervisor roles: you also have additional training in supervision and experience working directly with this client group

We strongly encourage applications from therapists with lived experience of the asylum process, and from Global Majority and ethnically minoritised backgrounds. Don't meet every requirement? Apply anyway - we'd still love to hear from you.

What we offer

Free monthly group supervision, free use of our therapy rooms, ongoing CPD, and free onboarding and training covering trauma-informed practice, cross-cultural work, and working with interpreters.

Key details

Basis: Self-employed, minimum two-year commitment
Location: Plymouth or Exeter (Devon), Bridgwater, Taunton or Weston-super-Mare (Somerset), or Bristol
Hours: Minimum 2-3 hours per week, arranged directly with your clients
Pay: £35-£50 per session/hour depending on type (full breakdown in the job pack)

Before you apply

Please read the full Job Pack and our Impact Report (below) - they cover the organisation, team, role, responsibilities and pay in detail.  We're also hosting an optional online information session on 27th July at 7pm. Registration details can be found in the downloadable Job Pack (below).

How to apply

Answer the screening questions and attach your work history and experience in whatever format is easiest - CV, LinkedIn Profile or use our template CV which is downloadable below.

You're welcome to apply by video, or voice note instead, please contact us arrange this - details in the Job Pack - or if you have any questions, including reasonable adjustments.

Timeline
Deadline: 17th August 9am · Outcome by: 25th August · Interviews: 1st & 3rd September (online) ·  Induction: 19th September (online) · Client work begins: 1st October 

Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML)

Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Flexible working | salary £82,409 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML) to help us build beautifully simple, high-impact digital products that support teachers and improve outcomes for pupils across the UK.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We're a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)

• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact

• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

💡 About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML) to join our AI Platform team.

Oak's AI Platform team builds and maintains our core AI infrastructure, including shared services, prompt libraries and reusable pipelines. This is essential in enabling our product squads to deliver safe, effective and scalable AI features that support teachers and pupils across the UK.

You'll take a leading role in shaping Oak's AI Platform, contributing towards the technical direction for reliable, safe and scalable AI capabilities. You'll work with product squads to turn ambiguous problems into robust solutions, provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, and help establish the patterns, tooling and standards that enable responsible AI delivery across Oak.

You'll work across the boundary between machine learning and software engineering: taking the same ownership of production reliability, testing and developer experience as other senior engineers on the team, while keeping safety and responsible AI at the centre of what you build.

In this role, you may work on:

• Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including context chunking, prompt construction and implementing strategies to improve relevance and accuracy.

• Optimising embedding and vector similarity systems through semantic search, clustering, filtering logic and dimensionality reduction techniques.

• Supporting model evaluation and safety tooling, such as automated test harnesses, hallucination detection, content moderation and input guardrails.

• Contributing to model fine-tuning, prompting and deployment, with a focus on balancing performance, accuracy and cost-effectiveness.

🔧 What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the continuous improvement of Oak's machine learning models and systems, from prototype through to production at scale.

• Develop and maintain highly performant ed-tech applications that are secure, scalable, highly available and accessible to the widest number of users, meeting Government Digital Service standards.

• Be an expert authority within the engineering team on the architecture, code base and AI/ML best practices, providing mentorship to less experienced colleagues.

• Design and coordinate the integration of AI/ML models with existing Oak systems, ensuring robust model serving and end-to-end testing.

• Take responsibility for the operation and reliability of production services you build — monitoring performance, resolving issues, and addressing capacity constraints before they affect users.

• Lead the implementation of new processes or tools that improve the user or developer experience.

• As a member of the Oak team, contribute to the planning and culture of the organisation.

• Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.

• Deputise for more senior colleagues and take on other general responsibilities as required.

🌱 What We're Looking For

• 5+ years' experience leading the continuous improvement of machine learning models and systems in production, alongside significant experience architecting and building high-performing web applications with modern JavaScript libraries and tools.

• Extensive knowledge of machine learning frameworks and cloud-based machine learning tools, with experience moving models from development to production.

• Understanding of machine learning ethics, fairness frameworks and responsible AI principles, including bias detection and privacy-preserving data practices.

• Experience building evaluation frameworks and automated test harnesses for AI/ML systems from scratch. Including techniques for detecting hallucinations, measuring output quality, and monitoring model performance and safety in production.

• Proven experience proposing and implementing new processes or tools that improve developer experience and lead to higher quality products.

• Experience collaborating with product teams to lead the development of high-quality, high-impact products, with great communication and collaborative skills.

💛 Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working — we'll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

🌈 Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors.

If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.

📌 Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we're unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: We'll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.

Next steps

You'll answer a few admin questions and some questions related to your day-to-day job. Your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans), so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.

If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview across three stages. We're aiming to start interviews the week beginning 17th August 2026.

Stage 1: An introductory call to learn more about your skills and experience, and a chance for you to ask us about the role. This takes about 30 minutes.

Stage 2: A technical interview over Zoom, combining a hands-on pairing session or technical walk-through, followed by some technical interview questions. This takes around two hours.

Stage 3: A collaboration interview, focused on how you work with both engineering and non-engineering colleagues. This takes about 1 hour.

We love giving feedback, so at the end of the application process, we'll share our assessment of your performance.

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, don't leave it too long to avoid missing out.

We are an equal opportunity employer.

We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.

Job Role: Weekend Hostel Support Worker

Salary: £4,192 per year (full-time equivalent £26,200)

Hours: 6 hours per week, Saturday & Sunday, week one 08:00 - 11:00, week two 07:30 - 10:30

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Bath

Additional information:

This role requires working Saturday & Sunday on a rota, for example week one you will work 08:00 - 11:00, and then week two your hours will be 07:30 - 10:30, the following week will be the week one hours and so forth.

About Alongside:

Alongside is the new name for Julian House. We work with people experiencing social exclusion across the South and West of England, providing outreach, accommodation and support. Our clients may be sleeping rough, fleeing abuse, rebuilding after trauma, leaving prison, recovering from addiction, or trying to settle safely in a new community. Whatever their starting point, we work alongside people to help build safety, stability and independence.

If you’d like a real sense of job satisfaction, great career prospects and a competitive benefits package, you could be who we’re looking for!

About the Role:

Are you ready to make a real impact in your community? Join our vibrant and supportive team at Manvers Street Hostel, where every day brings new opportunities to change lives. We’re passionate about delivering person-centred support to some of the most vulnerable individuals in Bath and North East Somerset.

Our hostel is a lively, fast-paced environment that operates 24/7, 365 days a year — providing essential support to people experiencing rough sleeping. It’s a place where compassion meets action, and no two days are the same.

We’re currently looking for a committed Weekend Hostel Support Worker to join us for short but meaningful shifts — 3 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’re someone who thrives in a dynamic setting, enjoys working as part of a close-knit team, and is driven by the desire to make a difference, we’d love to hear from you!

What you’ll be doing:

• Give clients advice, and information and provide an enabling service so they can access the appropriate services.
• Be a positive member of the Hostel team and work in close partnership with colleagues and relevant external agencies.
• Responsible for the day-to-day health and safety, and the safe running of the accommodation.
• Ensure all clients are provided with a high-quality person-centred service.

Please note: Job descriptions are not exhaustive, and the successful candidate may occasionally be asked to take on other duties that align with the key responsibilities outlined.

You can view the full job description by clicking here.

What we’re looking for:

• Empathy and understanding of the needs of Julian House clients.
• Good communication skills to build up relationships with clients and external agencies.

There are many great reasons to join our team!

• Access to our Rewards Platform, which includes an Employee Assistance Programme and Health Cash Plan
• 27 days annual leave, including an extra day off for your birthday, plus bank holidays - increasing up to 30 days after 4 years of continuous employment (pro rata for part-time staff)
• 30% staff discount at our charity shops
• A generous and competitive pension scheme
• A supportive culture where staff feedback is highly valued and regular supervisions with line managers are conducted
• Great opportunities for career development and free monthly training sessions from experienced facilitators
• For all the fantastic and valuable work, you’ll be doing, you’ll be eligible for the Blue Light Card which offers amazing discounts on thousands of brands
• Reflective Practice sessions from objective, external facilitators

Our Ethos

As an Equal Opportunities employer, we have an Equality and Diversity Action plan in place showing our commitment in ensuring continuous improvement in creating an inclusive culture. We also have a committed group of Inclusion & Diversity champions who meet monthly to ensure progress is being made. We invite applications from people from all backgrounds and cultures, especially minority groups that are underrepresented in the workplace. We also welcome applications from those with lived experience. We embrace flexibility and are proud to be a Disability Confident and Mindful employer, as well as an Armed Forces Covenant Supporter.

If you have any special access requirements or other support needs throughout the application process (including interview), please contact us so that we can let you know how we can support you. We accept CVs and applications in all formats.

DBS Checks

We welcome applications from people with lived experience. All applicants working with our clients will be expected to undertake an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check. A criminal conviction will not necessarily prevent you from becoming an employee, the decision will depend on the type of offence and its relevance to the role. If you would like to discuss any convictions you may have, please contact the person named in the advert. All information will be dealt with according to our Data Protection Policy.

Please note: We reserve the right to close our vacancies once the perfect candidate has been found. We recommend submitting your application as soon as possible so that you don’t miss out!