Own the robotic arm inside a navigation loop that already knows where the tools, the patient and the plan are. Task and conditional autonomy, per skill, with a surgeon supervising always.
Medivis builds the surgical navigation platform that puts the plan on the patient, in the surgeon's view. Cranial and spine navigation are FDA cleared and in use at leading health systems. Robotics is our Frontier program to add a robotic arm to that loop: the arm inherits the registration, the tracked instruments and the approved plan the navigation system already has, drives to the plan, and stops. You will own that arm.
What you will build Robotic positioning inside a system that already knows where everything is. The first skills are rigid-anatomy targeting: trajectories for external ventricular drains, pedicle screws and prostate needles. They reach Level 2 (task autonomy) and Level 3 (conditional autonomy) on the standard surgical-robot scale, with a surgeon supervising every task or sequence and able to take over instantly. Level 5 is not a goal; there is no regulatory pathway for it and we say so publicly.
What you will do:
Design and implement the control stack that takes an approved trajectory from Medivis Navigation and drives a collaborative arm to it: kinematics, motion planning, admittance and force control, hold and release.
Integrate the arm with our optical tracking and patient registration so the robot works in the navigation system's coordinate frame, not its own.
Build the safety layer: virtual fixtures, workspace and no-fly constraints, force thresholds for events like dural breach and bone breakthrough, and instant surgeon takeover.
Define what "done" means per skill: bench and phantom protocols, accuracy and repeatability targets, and the evidence a skill needs before it climbs a level.
Work directly with our surgeon partners in the lab and the cadaver suite, and turn what you see there into requirements.
Lay the groundwork for the regulatory path: design controls, hazard analysis and traceability from the first prototype, alongside our quality and regulatory team.
What you bring Six or more years building real robots that ship: manipulators, surgical or medical robots, collaborative arms, or comparable safety-critical systems.
Depth in manipulator control: kinematics, trajectory generation, force and impedance control, real-time loops, and the sensors that feed them.
Strong C++ and Python. Comfort with ROS 2 or an equivalent middleware, and with the vendor SDKs of at least one collaborative arm.
Hands-on experience integrating robots with external tracking or vision systems and reasoning carefully about coordinate frames, latency and calibration.
A habit of measuring: you bring accuracy numbers, not adjectives.
Comfort working alongside surgeons and being told, in the room, what is wrong.
Nice to have:
Prior work under a medical device quality system (IEC 62304, ISO 14971, ISO 13485) or another safety-critical standard.
Experience with surgical navigation, image-guided intervention, or registration and tracking.
Familiarity with the surgical-robot autonomy scale and the regulatory discussion around it.
How we work A small team of clinicians, engineers and designers in New York. Frontier programs are co-developed with partner institutions, so you will see your work in surgeons' hands early and often. We ship, we measure, and we do not over-claim.
