Head of Software Engineering

You will lead software engineering across the navigation platform: the real-time vision and registration pipeline, the surgical planning and intra-operative software, the integration layer that ties software to the electromechanical system, and the AI models that sit underneath. You inherit a strong, small team of software engineers, AI researchers and integration engineers who have built the core from scratch, and you grow it. Two engineers join under you in the first phase; the plan after that is a team of ten or more.

You report to a Co-Founder and CTO who came from big tech, is hands-on and in the room. He needs a partner who can run engineering day to day so he can spend more of his time on the product and the clinical problem.

What you will own

• Technical direction and architecture for the software platform, from prototype to a maintainable, testable product
• Delivery: planning, prioritisation and shipping against a fixed clinical and regulatory timeline
• Engineering quality in a regulated setting: code review, testing strategy, traceability, and a software development lifecycle that will stand up to IEC 62304 and FDA scrutiny without slowing the team to a crawl
• Hiring and growing the team, including the two first-phase engineers and the leads who follow
• The interface with hardware, V&V, regulatory and clinical, so software is never the thing waiting on everyone else
• A clear position on AI-assisted development: where it speeds the team up, where it does not belong in a device that goes into a patient, and how the code is reviewed either way

• Ten or more years in software engineering with at least three leading a team that shipped a complex real-time or embedded product
• Deep fluency in modern C++ and Python, and the judgment to know when each belongs
• Hands-on background in at least one of: computer vision, 3D registration or SLAM, motion control, imaging, real-time systems
• Experience taking software through a regulated or safety-critical lifecycle (IEC 62304, ISO 13485, DO-178C, ISO 26262 or similar), or the demonstrable rigour to learn it fast
• A track record of hiring engineers who turned out to be excellent
• Still able to read a pull request and tell a good one from a bad one

Strong signals

Surgical and medical devices with software at the core, navigation or image-guided systems, autonomous systems, scientific instrumentation, early-stage hardware companies that shipped. A first FDA submission under your belt is a plus, not a requirement.