Head of Software Engineering

Senior Software Engineering Leader

A MedTech company, Central New Jersey. On-site. Reports to the Co-Founder and CTO.

The problem

Our client is building a complex electromechanical surgical system with vision-based, trackerless navigation: computer vision and AI that register the patient to the surgical plan to sub-millimetre accuracy in a live operating room, with no tracking hardware attached to the patient. The research works. The team recently brought registration accuracy back under half a millimetre against laser-scan ground truth. The job now is turning a research-grade system into a medical device that ships, clears regulators and runs reliably in hundreds of operating rooms.

That is a software leadership problem as much as an engineering one, and they do not yet have the person who owns it.

The role

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

What they are looking for

• 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.

Who should not apply

If you want a spec handed to you, a mature process to follow, or a team large enough to delegate everything, this is the wrong company. The pace is set by a clinical and regulatory timeline, the team is small, and the leader they hire will write code in the first ninety days.