Senior Machine Learning Engineer in Cambridge

About CMR Surgical

At CMR Surgical, we’re revolutionising the future of minimal access surgery with Versius, our next‑generation surgical robotic system. We’re growing fast, and we’re on a mission to transform how surgery is delivered globally for the benefit of patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems. Our values—Ambitious, Humble, People‑Focused, and Fair & Responsible—define our approach to innovation, partnership, and growth. If you believe in making a meaningful difference in healthcare and want to be part of a purpose‑driven company with bold ambitions, now is the time to join us.

CMR is an exciting and evolving company to be joining right now. Our commitment to our goal of building a world‑class medical devices company is underpinned by the ground‑breaking innovation of our next generation of surgical robots and a diverse team of talented and supportive individuals. We’re breaking new ground which makes working here exciting, it provides autonomy, opportunity and makes the things you do visible. Come and join us and see what you’re capable of.

About the Role

You will be a core member of the Applied AI team, developing AI systems that operate in real surgical environments. This role focuses on delivering production‑grade machine learning (ML) systems that enhance surgical precision, provide decision support, and enable new capabilities in robotic‑assisted surgery. You will work across the full lifecycle, from problem definition and data strategy through to deployment on real systems. We combine cutting‑edge robotics with AI to deliver real‑world impact in the operating room. If you want to build systems that directly affect patient care, this is a rare opportunity to do so at scale.

Responsibilities

• Translate clinical and product needs into ML tasks, metrics, and evaluation frameworks.
• Select, adapt, and fine‑tune the state‑of‑the‑art ML models for the application.
• Define data requirements and dataset strategy.
• Analyse model failures and drive targeted data improvements.
• Work with domain experts to establish high‑quality ground truth.
• Collaborate with data and embedded software teams to deploy reliable models.
• Own end‑to‑end ML solutions from concept to production.
• Communicate and document technical decisions and trade‑offs clearly.

We’d expect you to be willing to turn your hand to anything within the applied AI team remit that helps the team deliver its objectives.

About you

To be successful in this role, you’ll need to have/be:

• Degree in a STEM field (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Robotics) or equivalent experience.
• Experience developing and deploying machine learning models, ideally in computer vision or multimodal systems.
• Experience with data curation, augmentation, and error analysis.
• Experience with model deployment and optimisation for performance (e.g. latency, memory), on edge or cloud environments.
• Strong hands‑on experience with Python and modern ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch or TensorFlow).

Desired, but not essential:

• PhD or master’s in computer science, machine learning, mathematics, statistics, engineering, physics, robotics or relevant fields.
• Experience in robotics, medical devices, or other safety‑critical domains.
• Experience with LLMs, multimodal models, VLAs or foundation model adaptation.
• Familiarity with LoRA, distillation, or other efficient fine‑tuning methods.
• Track record of solving ML problems under real‑world constraints.
• Open‑source, publication, or technical leadership contributions.
• Experience with C++, Linux, Nvidia Jetson, IGX platforms and Holoscan SDK.

Why Join Us?

We offer a competitive salary and a great benefits package including a bonus, pension, healthcare and enhanced global parental leave pay. Interested? We’d love to hear from you! This role requires candidates to have eligibility to work within the UK.