Head of AI Research

• Salary: competitive, with significant stock options for early team members, and a workplace pension scheme.
• Flexible working: we are open to hybrid arrangements for the right person.
• Annual learning budget: for conferences, training or development.
• Time off: 25 days annual leave plus public holidays.
• Parental leave: three months paid maternity, one month paid paternity leave.
• Impact and recognition: work on life-changing technology, showcased globally in major medical breakthroughs.
• All the tools you need: new equipment and tools to help you do your best work, from laptops to specialised XR devices and software.

We will be growing our package of benefits over time.

• Own the AI programme. Lead the AI team, research and engineering, starting with our Lead AI Engineer and growing to include research scientists, ML engineers and placement students.
• Own the research roadmap. Define and maintain a 12 to 24 month roadmap across the research streams below, each tied to a product need and a measurable endpoint.
• Own the foundation-model programme. From segmentation and reconstruction today to models trained on surgical video across endpoints tomorrow. Keep it honest about what is measured and what is modelled.
• Ship what you research. Set the handover criteria (accuracy, latency, robustness, documentation) between research and engineering, and enforce them in both directions.
• Own the data strategy. Design our multimodal operating-room data programme: what is captured, how it is annotated and curated, which benchmarks it feeds, and how it is governed for research use under ethics and data-sharing agreements.
• Design the evidence. With Clinical Affairs and Regulatory, design the pre-specified evaluations (bench, phantom, cadaveric, supervised clinical) that generate evidence for publications and the technical file.
• Build academic partnerships and win funding. Sponsored studentships, industrial placements, project-partner agreements and joint grant applications. Act as our named investigator on public grants.
• Own publications and scientific profile. Set the publication strategy and represent XRlabs at the principal meetings in computer-assisted surgery and medical imaging.
• Hire and grow the team. Recruit and mentor research scientists, ML engineers and placement students.
• Protect the IP. Identify patentable inventions and support counsel through filing.

• Real-time stereo surface reconstruction: low-latency depth and surface estimation from exoscope and microscope video, robust to the optics and clutter of live surgery.
• Foundation-model adaptation for surgical video: parameter-efficient adaptation of vision foundation models to depth, pose and scene understanding that generalises across scopes, sites and procedures.
• Deformable registration and intraoperative model update: keeping preoperative anatomy registered to the live field as tissue moves and deforms, with quantified error.
• Vision-based assessment of operative technique: video-derived measures of operative performance and workflow.

The first three are the priority for year one.

• Research roadmap approved within 90 days.
• Two placements or studentships agreed.
• One grant submitted and three publications submitted.
• A benchmark suite for reconstruction and registration in routine use by engineering.
• Two research scientists hired.

• You bridge academia and product. You publish, and you ship.
• You are rigorous about claims. Measured, modelled and future are three different things, and you keep them apart.
• You build people. Your former students and engineers would work with you again.
• You care about the clinical problem. The operating room fascinates you, not just the architecture.

We are at the intersection of AR, AI and surgical robotics, backed by top investors and working with leading hospitals in the UK and US. If you want to be part of a small, elite team building groundbreaking technology from the ground up, this is your opportunity.