United Kingdom · Technology and data · Senior (5-8 years)

Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist

Here is the whole job, in plain words. What it is, what you decide, how you're judged, how people get here and where they go next. Then the part no course gives you: twelve AI tutors who learn your work.

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Free to start: a plan built for this role, and a Future Fluency module to try first. No card.

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  • Experience bandSenior (5-8 years)
  • Direct reportsNo direct reports
  • Reports toLead NLP Scientist
  • UK framework levelUsually a manager, or the deepest specialist in a team

Also advertised as Senior NLP Engineer · Senior Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) · Senior AI Scientist (Language Models)

Built on 43,079 real UK job descriptions we analysed · grounded in qualifications employers recognise

1From this job to a course

The qualifications matched to this job

OCNLR Level 5 Diploma in Software Engineering with Artificial Intelligence OCN London · Level 5 · covers 1 of 1 standard
ATHE Level 5 Extended Diploma in Computing ATHE Ltd · Level 5 · covers 1 of 1 standard
Pearson BTEC Level 5 Higher National Diploma in Computing for England Pearson Education Ltd · Level 5 · covers 1 of 1 standard
Pearson BTEC Level 5 Higher National Diploma in Cloud Computing Pearson Education Ltd · Level 5 · covers 1 of 1 standard
Qualifi Level 3 Extended Diploma in IT and Data Science Qualifi Ltd · Level 3 · covers 1 of 1 standard
Qualifi Level 3 Diploma in Data Science Qualifi Ltd · Level 3 · covers 1 of 1 standard

Matched from the standards this job is measured against: a suggestion, not an official ruling.

The units you would start with

Machine Learning Algorithms OCNLR Level 5 Diploma in Software Engineering with Artificial Intelligence
Data Analytics and Machine Learning ATHE Level 5 Extended Diploma in Computing
Machine Learning Pearson BTEC Level 5 Higher National Diploma in Computing for England
Machine Learning Methods and Models in Data Science Qualifi Level 3 Extended Diploma in IT and Data Science

The future skills this job leans on

AI Fluency working with AI as a thinking partner
Data Fluency turning numbers into a decision
Systems Fluency seeing the whole picture
Your Plan Illustration

Built for Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist

4 units that map to this job, from the qualifications that cover it.

  1. Machine Learning Algorithms OCN London · covers 1 of 1 standards Level 5
  2. Data Analytics and Machine Learning ATHE Ltd · covers 1 of 1 standards Level 5
  3. Machine Learning Pearson Education Ltd · covers 1 of 1 standards Level 5
  4. Machine Learning Methods and Models in Data Science Qualifi Ltd · covers 1 of 1 standards Level 3
These are the real units behind this job, in the order they rank for it. Nothing here is marked done, because this plan has not been started by anyone yet. Yours would fill in as you go.

2AI and this work

Will AI change your work as a Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist?

Nobody can say exactly how. Here is what this job is being asked for next, and where to start.

The new skills this role is being asked for

  • Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration
  • Multimodal AI for Language
Why each one is rising

The future skills this job leans on

We'll only ever tell you what we can actually back up. No hype, no scare tactics.

What happens when you start

Next, a free account. We build your Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist plan as you set up, starting with a Future Fluency module on using AI in your job. No card.

Your first Future Fluency module is free. After that, your AI tutor is £70 a month.

3What this role really is

This job involves building, optimising and deploying models that understand, generate and process human language. It covers tasks such as analysing customer feedback and automating content generation, using current NLP techniques to solve practical problems.

4What you'd actually use

The tools this job runs on, and how well you'd need to know each one.

The core language for all model development, data manipulation, and scripting. You'll be writing production-quality Python code daily.

Hugging Face Transformers Expert

Fine-tuning and deploying pre-trained language models, building custom pipelines, and experimenting with new architectures. This library is central to our NLP work.

spaCy / NLTK Advanced

Efficient text preprocessing, tokenisation, named entity recognition (NER), and part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Used for foundational NLP tasks and feature engineering.

AWS SageMaker / Databricks Advanced

Building and managing end-to-end MLOps pipelines, training models at scale, and optimising Spark jobs for large datasets. You'll be comfortable in a cloud ML environment.

Pinecone / Weaviate (or similar Vector DB) Advanced

Designing indexing strategies, managing vector embeddings, and optimising retrieval performance for RAG systems. You'll be working with these to power our semantic search and knowledge retrieval.

Docker / Kubernetes (or managed services like EKS/GKE) Advanced

Packaging models into containers for consistent deployment and scaling models in production environments. You'll need to know how to get your models from notebook to production reliably.

MLflow / Weights & Biases Advanced

Tracking experiments, logging model parameters and metrics, and comparing different model runs. Essential for reproducible research and effective model development.

5What you get to decide, and how that grows

Power in a job isn't your title. It's what you're allowed to decide. Here's how it grows as you move up.

The choiceComing in Where you are nowThe step above
Technical Approach for an NLP Problem Proposes 1-2 standard approaches to supervisor for review and selection. No independent decision. Proposes 2-3 approaches, outlines pros/cons, and recommends one to manager. Manager makes final decision. Designs and justifies the optimal technical approach, considering trade-offs. Informs Lead NLP Scientist of decision, seeking input on high-risk aspects.
New Tool/Library Adoption (within existing tech stack) Identifies a potential tool and asks supervisor for permission to experiment. Researches a tool, prototypes its use, and proposes adoption to manager, outlining benefits and costs. Evaluates new tools, conducts a small-scale POC, and makes a recommendation to Lead NLP Scientist for team-wide adoption, considering long-term maintenance and integration. Can implement minor tools independently.
Project Scope Changes Immediately escalates any proposed scope changes to supervisor for guidance. Assesses impact of scope change on timeline/resources, discusses with manager, and helps re-negotiate with product. Proactively identifies potential scope creep, assesses impact, and proposes adjustments to product and Lead NLP Scientist. Can negotiate minor scope adjustments directly.
Mentorship & Junior Guidance Asks senior team members for help when stuck. Provides informal help to new joiners on basic tasks, escalating complex questions to senior colleagues. Formally mentors 1-2 junior specialists, conducting regular code reviews, providing structured feedback, and guiding their technical development. Identifies learning opportunities.

6How you'll be judged

The scoreboard, and what is not on it. The hard targets, how often each is actually looked at, and the quiet signals that never reach a dashboard.

Production Model Performance
The accuracy, precision, recall, or F1-score of the NLP models you've designed and deployed to production.
Target · Achieve and maintain >90% F1-score (or equivalent for task) on critical production models, with minimal degradation over time.

Your customer intent classification model consistently hits 92% F1-score, reducing misrouted support tickets by 15%.

Model Inference Latency & Throughput
The speed at which your models process requests and the volume of requests they can handle per second.
Target · Optimise model inference latency by 20% or improve throughput by 25% for key services within a quarter, without sacrificing accuracy.

You refactor a model's serving pipeline, dropping average inference time from 500ms to 400ms, allowing us to handle 20% more concurrent users.

Project Delivery & Timeliness
The ability to deliver complex NLP workstreams on time and to specification, meeting agreed-upon deadlines with product and engineering teams.
Target · Successfully deliver 80% of assigned NLP workstreams on or before the agreed-upon deadline, with clear documentation and handover.

You lead the development of a new summarisation feature, shipping the production-ready model and API integration within the 8-week timeline.

Cloud Resource Optimisation
The efficiency of your models and pipelines in terms of cloud compute and storage costs.
Target · Identify and implement optimisations that reduce the running cost of your models by at least 10% per quarter.

You switch a model from A100 GPUs to a more cost-effective T4 instance after quantisation, saving £500 per month in cloud spend.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship
Your ability to guide junior team members, share knowledge, and elevate the technical capabilities of the wider team.
  • Regularly conducts code reviews for juniors, provides clear, actionable feedback. Actively participates in internal tech talks or workshops. Junior team members seek your advice on complex problems. You're seen as a reliable source of technical truth.
Problem Framing & Solution Design
How effectively you can take an ambiguous business problem and translate it into a well-defined NLP task with a clear, technically sound solution.
  • Consistently proposes innovative yet practical NLP solutions to product challenges. Your technical designs are robust and consider scalability and maintainability. You can articulate trade-offs between different approaches clearly to non-technical audiences.
Documentation & Knowledge Sharing
The quality and completeness of your technical documentation, model cards, and internal wikis.
  • Your models have comprehensive model cards explaining their purpose, limitations, and biases. Internal wikis are up-to-date with your work. Other team members can easily understand and reproduce your experiments and deployments based on your documentation.
Cross-functional Collaboration
How well you work with product, engineering, and other data teams to ensure successful project delivery.
  • Product managers praise your ability to clarify requirements. Engineering teams find your model APIs easy to integrate. You proactively communicate potential roadblocks and solutions to relevant teams. You're generally seen as easy to work with and a good partner.

7Would you like it

Both sides. What people enjoy, and what grinds them down.

What people enjoy
Solving Hard, Real-World Problems

You thrive on taking a complex, ambiguous business challenge related to language and breaking it down into a solvable NLP problem. You enjoy the intellectual puzzle of figuring out how to make machines understand human intent or generate coherent text.

You're given the task of automatically tagging customer support tickets with specific product issues. You love the challenge of designing a multi-label classification system that handles nuanced language and slang, knowing it will save agents hours.

Seeing Your Work in Production

It's not enough for a model to work well in a notebook; you're driven by the desire to see your creations deployed, used by real people, and making a tangible impact. You enjoy the full lifecycle, from research to deployment and monitoring.

After months of work, your new semantic search engine goes live. You get a real kick out of seeing usage metrics climb and hearing positive feedback from users who can now find information much faster.

Continuous Learning & Technical Growth

You're genuinely excited by the rapid advancements in NLP and machine learning. You actively seek out new research, experiment with novel architectures, and are always looking to deepen your understanding of the underlying theory and practical applications.

You spend personal time digging into the latest research on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA, and then propose an internal project to apply it to one of our existing models, knowing it could save significant compute costs.

What frustrates people
  • The 80/20 Data Problem: You'll spend roughly 80% of your time on unglamorous data cleaning, regex scripting, and annotation, and only 20% on actual model building and experimentation. It's essential, but it can be a grind.
  • Unrealistic Stakeholder Expectations: You'll constantly hear 'Can't we just use ChatGPT for this?' and have to patiently explain why a custom, domain-specific model is needed and won't be as magical (or as cheap) as a trillion-parameter generalist model.
  • The 'Works on My Machine' Syndrome: A model achieves 95% accuracy on a clean, balanced test set, but performance plummets in production when faced with messy, out-of-distribution user input. Debugging production issues is a different beast.
  • The Cloud Bill Surprise: Kicking off a multi-day hyperparameter search on a cluster of A100 GPUs and feeling a sense of dread about the upcoming AWS/GCP/Azure invoice. Cost optimisation is a real concern.
  • Chasing the State-of-the-Art (SOTA): You finally get a new model into production, only to see a paper released on arXiv the next day that makes your approach obsolete. The pace of innovation is relentless.
  • The Black Box Dilemma: Trying to explain to legal or compliance why the model made a specific (and potentially problematic) decision when its inner workings are a web of billions of non-interpretable parameters. Interpretability is a constant battle.
  • Annotation Hell: Realising mid-project that the annotation guidelines were ambiguous, leading to inconsistent labels that are poisoning the dataset and require a costly re-labelling effort. Data quality is paramount, and often painful.
What this role does not give you
  • A perfectly clean, pre-labelled dataset for every problem you encounter.
  • A static, predictable technical landscape where you can rely on old methods.
  • Complete autonomy over product decisions without needing to consult others.
  • A guarantee that every model you build will make it into production.

8Who you work with

This role directly influences the intelligence and usability of our core products. Your work will enable new features, improve existing ones, and drive efficiency across various business functions by automating language-related tasks. Frankly, you'll be shaping how our systems 'think' and 'speak'.

Inside the business
  • Lead NLP Scientist (your manager)
  • Product Managers (for feature requirements)
  • Software Engineers (for integration and deployment)
  • Data Scientists (for shared data sources and insights)
  • UX Designers (for user interaction with NLP features)
  • Junior NLP Specialists (for mentorship and guidance)
Outside the business
  • Open-source communities (for contributions and learning)
  • Academic researchers (for staying current with SOTA)

9What you need before you start

Not a wish list. The things you would be expected to already have.

  • A strong foundation in machine learning principles, including supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning techniques.
  • Demonstrable experience (5+ years) in building and deploying NLP models in a professional setting.
  • Proficiency in Python and its associated data science/ML libraries (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, PyTorch/TensorFlow).
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) for ML workloads.
  • Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and software engineering best practices.
  • A portfolio or demonstrable projects showcasing your NLP capabilities (e.g., GitHub repos, Kaggle competitions, blog posts).

10What to practise next

Where the job is going, and what to do about it starting this week.

Advanced MLOps for NLP at Scale

As our models get larger and our user base grows, deploying and maintaining NLP systems becomes a significant engineering challenge. You'll need to move beyond basic pipelines to truly resilient, scalable, and cost-effective MLOps.

Distributed training and inference · Model versioning and lineage · A/B testing and experimentation frameworks · Automated model retraining and lifecycle management

  • This quarter: Take ownership of optimising the MLOps pipeline for one of our critical production models.
  • Next quarter: Research and propose a new tool or approach for distributed training that could save us compute costs.
  • Within 6 months: Lead a project to implement a more robust A/B testing framework for NLP models.
  • Throughout: Share your MLOps best practices and lessons learned with the engineering and data science teams.

Quick win: Review the current monitoring dashboards for your deployed models. Can you add more granular metrics or set up better alerts for data drift? Propose one immediate improvement.

Cost-Optimised NLP

Large language models are powerful, but they're also incredibly expensive to train and run. As we scale, the ability to deliver high performance at a lower cost will become a key differentiator, and frankly, a business imperative.

Model quantisation and pruning · Knowledge distillation · Efficient inference engines (e.g., ONNX Runtime, TensorRT) · Cloud cost management for GPUs

  • This month: Conduct a cost analysis for one of our existing production models and identify areas for optimisation.
  • Next quarter: Experiment with model quantisation on a non-critical model and measure the performance/cost trade-off.
  • Within 6 months: Lead a project to implement a cost-saving technique (e.g., knowledge distillation) on a key NLP service.
  • Throughout: Actively participate in discussions around cloud budget and propose cost-effective solutions for new projects.

Quick win: Review our current cloud spend for NLP training and inference. Can you identify any idle resources or opportunities to switch to cheaper instance types for non-critical workloads?

11Staying current once you are in

What people here do to keep up
  • Actively contributing to open-source NLP projects or maintaining your own relevant GitHub repositories.
  • Attending and presenting at industry conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, KDD) or local meetups.
  • Publishing technical blog posts or articles about your NLP work and insights.
  • Participating in online courses or specialisations to deepen your knowledge in specific NLP sub-fields (e.g., Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, multimodal AI).
  • Engaging in Kaggle competitions or similar data science challenges to hone your skills on diverse datasets.

12The rising capability

The rising capability

Zavmo analysis

What's rising in its place

This is where the work is heading, and the higher pay with it. Get fluent here and the shift stops being a threat and starts being your edge.

Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration

Honestly, competitors are already using LLMs (like GPT or Llama) to draft reports in 10 minutes that used to take 2 hours. Analysts who figure this out will outproduce their peers 3:1. This isn't future-gazing; it's happening now.

  • Context windows and token limits
  • Temperature settings for different tasks
  • RAG architectures for proprietary data
  • Output validation and hallucination detection
  • Prompt chaining for complex analysis

Multimodal AI for Language

The future of AI isn't just text; it's about understanding and generating across different data types—text, image, audio, video. Our products will increasingly need to process and respond to these rich inputs, and language will often be the bridge.

  • Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
  • Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech integration
  • Cross-modal embeddings
  • Instruction tuning for multimodal tasks

13What you’ll use

What you’ll use

Skills this role draws on

Technical

  • Transformer Architectures
  • Fine-Tuning & Transfer Learning
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Classical NLP Techniques
  • MLOps for NLP
  • Evaluation & Explainability

14The pathway

The pathway

How you actually get there, here

How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.

  1. 1

    Mid-Level NLP Specialist (L2) Internally

    2-3 years

    Skills to master

    • Independently owning and delivering well-defined NLP features, debugging complex models, improving code quality, and starting to mentor junior peers informally.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Consistently delivers high-quality production-ready models on time.
    • Proactively identifies and solves complex technical problems without constant supervision.
    • Demonstrates a strong understanding of the full ML lifecycle for NLP.
    • Has started to provide guidance and support to newer team members.
  2. 2

    Data Scientist with NLP Focus

    3-5 years

    Skills to master

    • Deepening expertise in NLP-specific model architectures, MLOps practices, and deploying models to production, moving beyond exploratory analysis.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Has successfully transitioned from exploratory data analysis to building and deploying robust NLP models.
    • Understands the nuances of text data preprocessing and feature engineering for NLP.
    • Can articulate the trade-offs between different NLP model choices for specific business problems.
  3. 3

    Software Engineer with ML Interest

    4-6 years

    Skills to master

    • Gaining a strong theoretical and practical foundation in machine learning and NLP, moving from general software development to specialised model building and deployment.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Has taken significant coursework or self-study in ML/NLP fundamentals.
    • Has contributed to ML projects or built personal ML/NLP projects outside of core software engineering.
    • Demonstrates a strong desire and aptitude to specialise in NLP.
    • Understands how to build scalable and maintainable ML systems.

15Where this role leads

The long view: This work can lead to senior scientist roles that set technical direction, or into leadership roles managing AI and ML teams across a business.

The ten Future Fluencies

Zavmo analysis

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

A qualification proves you can do the job as it's defined today. These ten are what decide whether you're still the obvious person for it in five years. They're the capabilities employers are now writing into senior roles faster than people are learning them. Zavmo weaves them through whatever you study, so you come out with both: the credential and the fluency.

The highlighted ones are the Fluencies your role leans on hardest, from how Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist is actually changing.

How you would learn this

One to one, on the work you already do

A tutor sets the task against your own job and marks the reasoning, at your pace. There is no cohort to fall behind.

A lesson from Machine Learning Algorithms, worked against Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist.

Machine Learning Algorithms Level 5

Applied to your work in Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist

This unit aims to provide learners with a comprehensive understanding of machine learning, covering its concepts, principles, and techniques, including a range of machine learning algorithms and relevant programming libraries. Learners will also understand appropriate solutions for evaluating artificial intelligent tasks using various tools, methods and techniques.

How the thinking builds
  1. 1 Remember
  2. 2 Understand
  3. 3 Apply
  4. 4 Analyse
  5. 5 Evaluate
  6. 6 Create
An illustration of a Zavmo lesson, built from this role’s own route. The unit, its objective and every criterion above are the awarding body’s own words, not an example.

It is £70 a month, billed monthly. Your free first module is Future Fluency, and you can cancel any time.

See Your Progress Grow Illustration
Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist
  • Transformer Architectures
  • Fine-Tuning & Transfer Learning
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Classical NLP Techniques
  • MLOps for NLP
  • Evaluation & Explainability
This is your Mind Palace on learn.zavmo.ai. Every skill above comes from this role's own record, not an example borrowed from another job. A node lights up when you evidence it, and what you build stays yours between jobs. That is the part a course cannot do.

16The detail, folded away

Everything else the record holds

The career branches in full, how AI is already showing up in the day-to-day, and the questions people ask about this job. Here when you want them, out of the way while you decide.

Where it leads next, rung by rung

Where it leads

The career path, and where it branches

Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist is a start, not a ceiling. Each step below asks for new skills and hands back more autonomy.

  1. Lead NLP Scientist (L4)

    3-5 years from Senior

    You'll move from leading workstreams to architecting multi-component NLP systems and influencing technical direction across multiple teams. You'll also likely take on direct reports.

    • Designing enterprise-level ML platforms and infrastructure.
    • Evaluating and selecting major vendor solutions (e.g., vector DBs, annotation platforms).
    • Driving research initiatives and translating them into product strategy.
    • Budget management for significant technical projects (e.g., £50K-£500K).
  2. NLP Manager (L5)

    4-6 years from Senior

    This path shifts your focus from individual technical contribution to building and leading a team of NLP specialists. You'll be responsible for the overall output and growth of your team.

    • Defining team vision and strategy aligned with company goals.
    • Managing team budget and operational overhead.
    • Developing and implementing team-wide technical standards and best practices.
    • Representing the team's work and needs to executive leadership.
Working with AI on the job

Working with AI

Where AI is starting to help

Let's be real: the NLP field is moving at an incredible pace, and if you're not using AI to boost your own productivity, you're falling behind. We're not just building AI; we're using it ourselves, every single day, to work smarter and faster.

As a Senior NLP Specialist, you'll be at the forefront of this. We encourage you to use AI tools to automate the tedious bits, accelerate your research, and even brainstorm complex architectural decisions. Think of it as having a highly intelligent co-pilot for your daily tasks, freeing you up for the truly challenging and creative work. Here's how you'll typically use AI to supercharge your output:

Boilerplate Code Generation

Use GitHub Copilot or a similar tool to instantly generate code for common tasks: data loading from S3, PyTorch/TensorFlow training loops, data visualisation with Matplotlib, and REST API endpoints with Flask/FastAPI. It's like having a junior engineer who never sleeps, just for the repetitive stuff.

Research Paper Summarisation

Feed new arXiv papers into a private LLM instance (via API) to get concise summaries, extract key methodologies, and identify potential applications for current projects. This cuts down on your required reading time significantly, letting you focus on the most relevant parts and stay ahead of the curve.

Architectural Brainstorming

Use a conversational AI as a sounding board for your complex NLP system designs. You can ask it things like: 'I need to build a system for semantic search on legal documents. What are the pros and cons of using a two-tower model vs. a cross-encoder for re-ranking?' It's surprisingly good at offering different perspectives.

Automated Documentation & Model Cards

Point a code-aware LLM at your completed training script and have it automatically generate a detailed README, function docstrings, and a draft of a 'model card' explaining the model's purpose, limitations, and biases. Yes, it's boring work, but AI can make it almost painless, ensuring your work is always well-documented.

Common questions

Common questions

How do you become a Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist?

Common routes in include Mid-Level NLP Specialist Internally (2-3 years), Data Scientist with NLP Focus (3-5 years) and Software Engineer with ML Interest (4-6 years). Times vary with prior experience.

Where can a Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist progress to?

This role can lead on to Lead NLP Scientist (3-5 years from Senior) and NLP Manager (4-6 years from Senior), depending on the skills you build.

What new skills matter most for a Senior Natural Language Processing Specialist?

Increasingly, Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration and Multimodal AI for Language. These are the skills our record of this role lists as growing.

Free tools

Want a read on where you stand?

Three free tools, no account needed. Each one ends with a role, a level and a way in.

17Where to go from here

Other roles at Level 5

Same depth of qualification, different job. Useful if the work appeals but this particular role does not.

More jobs in technology and data

Stay in the field you know and move sideways rather than up.

If you leave this industry

The skills built in this role apply across tech, finance, healthcare and media. NLP expertise is used in many industries and can open doors beyond any single sector.

This role profile is © 2026 Growth Engineering Technologies Ltd. Built from UK occupational standards and regulated qualification data, and written for Zavmo.

You're not behind. You're right on time. The shift is only just beginning. Your role won't look the same in two years. Be the one who leads the change, not the one it happens to. Start my plan, free What happens next: a free account, then we build your plan as you set up. No card. Build your plan, see your roadmap and meet the twelve tutors matched to you. All free. When you're ready to start learning, it's £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.