{"id":2579094,"url":"https://alion.io/job/capstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls","title":"Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception and Controls","company":{"id":176338,"name":"Capstan Medical","domain":"capstanmedical.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/capstan-medical","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":63,"open_postings":21,"ghost_share":0.619,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Menlo Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":161000,"max_usd":308000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1268},"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Localization","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch C++","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Edge AI","optional":true},{"name":"ONNX","optional":true},{"name":"Ray","optional":true},{"name":"ROS","optional":true},{"name":"ROS2","optional":true},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":true},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-14T22:03:57Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-21T02:45:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":5},"description":"Workplace Type: Hybrid - Onsite 3-4 days per week across Santa Cruz and West Menlo Park, CA, with at least 1 day per week in Santa Cruz\nReports To: Robotics & Controls Manager\nAbout Capstan Medical\nAt Capstan Medical, we're building one of the most exciting and innovative companies in medtech: a first-of-its-kind robotic platform for minimally invasive heart valve treatment.\nOur team combines surgical robotics, catheter-based delivery, and next-generation implants to turn complex procedures into safer, lower-stress solutions for patients and clinicians. We're a collaborative, hands-on team that moves fast, wears multiple hats, and believes the best ideas can come from anyone.\nBased in Santa Cruz, our workspace blends Bay Area innovation with a lifestyle near trails, beaches, and open space-a great place to do meaningful, career-defining work.\nAbout the Role\nTeach a heart valve robot to see where it is.\nWe're hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our robotics and controls team. You'll help our robot understand where its devices are inside the patient, using intraprocedural imaging such as fluoroscopy and echocardiography. That means building perception for image-to-robot registration and pose estimation, and taking it from research into a clinical system.\nThis is not a model-in-a-notebook role. Your work runs on a real-time robotic system, informs what physicians see during the procedure, and ships under FDA design controls.\nYou'll also help shape how we collect, organize, and learn from our robot and imaging data, and use it to improve our device models and controllers. You'll have a large say in how ML is done here, from the tools and standards we adopt to which problems we tackle first, and you'll be the person the rest of the team turns to for ML judgment.\nWhat You'll Do\nDevelop methods to register intraprocedural imaging, such as fluoroscopy and echocardiography, to the robot.\n\nEstimate the pose of catheters and implants from medical images.\n\nCombine image-based estimates with robot kinematics and other sensing, and quantify the uncertainty of each estimate.\n\nBuild data pipelines that capture, align, label, and version imaging and robot data for training and evaluation.\n\nUse simulation and synthetic data where real clinical data is limited.\n\nFit and improve models of device behavior from data, and work with controls engineers to turn them into better control.\n\nWork with clinical engineers and physicians to learn what the images show, what matters in the procedure, and what accuracy is good enough.\n\nRead the literature, prototype what looks promising, and tell us plainly what works on our data and what doesn't.\n\nDeploy models on the robot and meet real-time latency budgets.\n\nWrite the validation, test datasets, and design documentation that let learned components pass FDA design controls.\n\nSkills\nReal-World Machine Learning: You've taken models out of notebooks and into products that run on real data, with all its noise, drift, and edge cases.\n\nComputer Vision: Strong background in classical and learned computer vision, especially pose estimation, segmentation, tracking, or 2D/3D registration.\n\n3D Geometry: Solid grasp of rigid transforms, rotations, camera projection models, and calibration.\n\nProgramming: Strong Python and PyTorch skills. Comfortable reading and writing C++.\n\nData Engineering: You build pipelines, datasets, and evaluation harnesses that others can trust and reuse.\n\nResearch and Prototyping: You keep up with recent papers, can tell which ideas will survive contact with our data, and enjoy turning them into working prototypes.\n\nProblem-Solving: Comfortable with high ambiguity. You can take a fuzzy goal, break it into experiments, and pick a direction without a spec.\n\nCommunication: Excellent communicator who can explain ML clearly to controls engineers, clinical engineers, and physicians, document work effectively, and help the team decide when a model is good enough to trust.\n\nRequirements\nMS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field. PhD is a plus.\n\n4+ years of professional experience in computer vision or machine learning, classical or learned, including at least one system shipped to production on real-world data.\n\nExperience working with scarce, noisy, or expensive data, using synthetic data, augmentation, self-supervision, or physics priors to make up for it.\n\nExperience building ML on data from physical systems such as robots, cameras, medical imaging, or sensors.\n\nAbility to thrive in a fast-paced environment and own problems end-to-end.\n\nAbility to work onsite 3-4 days per week, split flexibly between our Santa Cruz, CA and West Menlo Park, CA offices, with at least 1 day per week in Santa Cruz.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nUltrasound or echocardiography experience, strongly preferred. Fluoroscopy or X-ray experience is also valuable, including 2D/3D registration or digitally reconstructed radiographs.\n\nExperience tracking catheters, needles, surgical tools, or continuum robots in images.\n\nSensor fusion and state estimation, such as Kalman filters or factor graphs.\n\nSystem identification or learned dynamics for control, including residual models on top of physics.\n\nRobotics software experience with ROS/ROS2 and on-device inference under latency constraints (ONNX, TensorRT).\n\nData platform and MLOps experience, including practices like dataset versioning and experiment tracking.\n\nMedical device or safety-critical background, including validating ML under FDA design controls.\n\nExperience as an early ML engineer on a team, setting up the tools, data practices, and evaluation that others build on.\n\nPublications at venues such as MICCAI, IPCAI, CVPR, ICRA, or IROS.\n\nWhy join us:\nWe offer a fun, fast-paced, collaborative environment where you will be working on transformational technologies in the cardiac healthcare space.\n\nWe offer outstanding benefits with medical, dental, and vision covered at 100% for you and your family, as well as flex time off.\n\nWe thrive in our work-hard, play-hard environment. Bring your bike or running shoes if you’d like or just be ready to enjoy a fun office outing. We enjoy time inside the office and out!","description_format":"text","description_chars":6213,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Medical & Healthcare Robotics","Cardiovascular Devices"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T01:12:38Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":60,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.602,"p_room":1,"age_days":5,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/capstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/capstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-21T05:21:35Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7851,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":176338},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=176338"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcapstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcapstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcapstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/capstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcapstan-medical-senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-and-controls"}]}