Senior AI/ML Engineer (AI Lead)

We are looking for a highly skilled Senior AI/ML Engineer (AI Lead) to take ownership of Custom Surgical’s AI technical direction and help translate real-world clinical data into robust, scalable AI systems.

This role combines hands-on technical leadership with strong product and system thinking. You will design, build, and guide AI/ML solutions across computer vision, multimodal models, and emerging AI capabilities, working closely with Engineering, Product, and clinical stakeholders.

You will play a key role in shaping how AI is applied across Custom Surgical’s products, ensuring technical excellence while enabling long-term scalability, reliability, and regulatory readiness.

Tasks

• Own and drive the technical direction of AI/ML development across Custom Surgical;
• Design, implement, and maintain computer vision and multimodal ML systems for real-world clinical data;
• Lead model development from experimentation to production, ensuring robustness, performance, and scalability ;
• Define best practices for training pipelines, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring of ML models;
• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering to align AI capabilities with real user workflows;
• Mentor and support junior and mid-level AI/ML engineers through reviews, guidance, and technical leadership;
• Contribute to architectural decisions around data pipelines, model lifecycle, and infrastructure ;
• Ensure AI systems are built with quality, safety, and regulatory constraints in mind;
• Stay up to date with advances in AI/ML and assess their relevance for real-world medical applications.

Requirements

• Strong experience as an AI/ML Engineer working on production-grade systems;
• Solid background in computer vision and deep learning ;
• Hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow ;
• Strong proficiency in Python and ML experimentation workflows;
• Experience taking ML models from research to production environments ;
• Ability to design and reason about end-to-end ML systems , not just individual models;
• Experience collaborating with software engineers and product teams;
• Fluency in English (spoken and written);
• Based in Munich or willing to relocate (on-site collaboration required).

Nice to have (but not required):

• Experience with LLMs or multimodal AI systems ;
• Background in medical imaging, healthcare, or regulated environments ;
• Experience with cloud-based ML infrastructure (e.g. GCP, AWS);
• Prior experience in a technical leadership or mentoring role ;
• Familiarity with data annotation workflows or weak supervision techniques.

What we expect from Custom Surgical Candidates:

• You are an owner — you take end-to-end responsibility for complex technical problems and drive long-term improvements;
• You have a growth mindset and enjoy building systems that evolve over time;
• You’re proactive and solutions-oriented — you work across teams to unblock progress and deliver outcomes when it matters;
• You are open, sincere, and comfortable giving and receiving frequent feedback ;
• You thrive in an international, young, and flexible company ;
• You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders;
• You enjoy mentoring others and raising the technical bar of the team.

Benefits

• Time flexibility and trust-based working culture;
• Home office when needed, with on-site collaboration in Munich;
• No unnecessary bureaucracy — high autonomy to shape AI architecture and priorities;
• WellPass / Deutschlandticket + JobRad bike leasing with insurance;
• Direct impact on products used daily by clinicians worldwide;
• The opportunity to define how AI is responsibly deployed in a regulated medical domain.