Founding Engineer

Full-time(an early engineering hire, not a company co-founder) What you'll actually own You are our expert in hip, shoulder, or knee replacement, and an engineer who solves hard problems. You understand the procedure deeply enough to reimagine how technology can help surgeons deliver a consistent, excellent result every time, not just the experts on their best day. The best solutions are usually creative and simple at the same time, and finding them is the work. You will define what Zooly's hip, shoulder, and knee product should sense, measure, and tell the surgeon, and then do the hard engineering to make it real: the sensing approach, the signal, the bench and cadaver work that proves it does something a surgeon cannot do on their own. If the hip, shoulder, or knee product ships with the right capability and evidence a buyer and a regulator believe, it will be because you cracked the problems no one had solved yet. Where the business is 12 months after you join If this hire goes the way we intend, one year from now: The team has a frozen, verification-ready design for our first product, backed by cadaver and bench evidence that our technology reliably detects something a surgeon cannot, with accuracy that is credible and independently measured. We have filed our FDA submission for the hip application, with intended use and product claims you defined and can defend. Our surgeon design team trusts the product because it reflects how they actually operate, not how engineers imagine they operate. The work is prioritized against real clinical evidence, and the shared engineering team knows exactly what the hip, shoulder, or knee product needs from them. That is the outcome we are hiring for. The responsibilities below are how you get there. About Zooly Zooly Labs is on a mission to make advanced surgical guidance more accessible for joint replacement surgery. Joint replacement can restore mobility and quality of life, yet surgeons often have limited objective information during the procedure to assess joint behavior and guide decisions. We build AI-guided technology that combines intelligent sensing, real-time data, and decision support with familiar surgical workflows and standard instruments, without large capital equipment. We are an early-stage company building a scalable platform across hip, knee, and shoulder. How we work at Zooly Patient-driven. Design-obsessed. We're an in-person team of curious, driven people who care about getting the details right, because there's a patient on the table counting on us. A few beliefs shape how we build, and this role lives at the center of them. The patient is why. Behind every procedure is a person counting on the people who built the tools. That is what keeps our standards high and our design work honest. Act like an owner. We take responsibility for our decisions and how we communicate, we think long-term, and we bias toward action. Master your craft. We invest in people who go deep. There is no ceiling that forces a great engineer or designer into management to advance. Go as far into your craft as you want. What this role is really like This is a hands-on role at a fast-growing startup racing real deadlines. You will scope a cadaver study one week and be elbow-deep in a sensor mounting fixture the next. You will own ambiguity, make calls with incomplete data, and solve the hard problem no one else can crack. If you want a large team, defined processes, and a narrow lane, this is not the role. If you want to be the person a product this important is built around, one that could change how hip, shoulder, or knee replacement is done, this is it. What you'll do Own the technical direction of the hip, shoulder, or knee product across Zooly's Sense, Solve, and Go capabilities, grounded in surgeon reality. Lead surgeon design meetings, cadaver and design labs, bench studies, and clinical workflow reviews, and turn what you see into decisions. Turn surgical needs into the requirements, experiments, and design decisions that drive what gets built. Define what 'good' means: clinically meaningful outputs, ground truth, acceptance criteria, and how algorithm results get interpreted. Own the sensing and system approach for the hip, shoulder, or knee product, from architecture through verification, working shoulder to shoulder with the engineers who build and test it. Own the hip, shoulder, or knee clinical and technical content for FDA strategy: intended use, product claims, verification and validation evidence, and responses to regulator questions. Support risk management, design controls, human factors, and clinical study planning with the Regulatory and Quality teams. Represent the hip, shoulder, or knee product in surgeon, strategic-partner, and investor conversations when needed. What you need to be able to do These are capabilities, not credentials. If you can do these things, we want to talk regardless of how many years it took you to get here. You have personally led at least one orthopaedic or surgical-navigation product from unmet clinical need through prototyping, verification and validation, and design transfer or regulatory readiness. You can sit across from a hip, shoulder, or knee surgeon, understand what they actually do, and turn it into a technical approach you can build, test, and defend, not just a spec you hand off. You know orthopaedic anatomy, hip, shoulder, or knee biomechanics, and implant and instrument workflows well enough to earn a surgeon's respect in the room. You can plan and run a cadaver lab, design lab, or bench study, including the experimental design, the data interpretation, and the follow-up. You can operate inside medical-device design controls, risk management, and verification and validation in an FDA-regulated or ISO 13485 environment without it slowing you to a crawl. You can carry a problem end to end: work with a surgeon, design the experiment, build or specify the hardware, run the test, read the data, and decide what to change. An advanced degree (MS or PhD) in biomedical engineering, biomechanics, robotics, mechanical engineering, or a related field is common in people who can do this work, but the ability above matters more than the diploma. What would make you a strong fit Direct experience in total hip, shoulder, or knee arthroplasty: implant positioning, trialing, navigation, or hip instrumentation. Experience with surgical navigation, robotics, smart instruments, intraoperative sensing, or AI-enabled decision-support products. You have established clinically meaningful performance metrics, ground truth, and validation strategies for sensor- or algorithm-enabled products. You have supported FDA 510(k) strategy, clinical evidence generation, or product claims development. A track record of shipped products, patents, peer-reviewed publications, or research-to-commercial technology transfer. You thrive at seed stage: rapid iteration, ambiguity, resource constraints, hands-on problem solving. Comfort with Python, MATLAB, or C/C++ to analyze experimental data, and familiarity with ML workflows (data prep, training, validation) using tools like scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Pandas. How this role works with the rest of the team You work on a small, close-knit team focused entirely on the hip, shoulder, or knee : you as the technical lead who carries the deep clinical understanding, alongside engineers who build and test alongside you. You will spend your days close to both the surgeon and the bench, turning what you learn in the OR and the lab straight into the next thing you build. The best ideas here tend to be the creative ones that are also simple, and you will help find them together. Behind the team is a shared engineering group that handles the software, electronics, and hardware every Zooly product is built on, so you can go deep on the hip, shoulder, or knee . Stay curious We hire curious people. The kind who took things apart as kids and never stopped asking how things work. If that sounds like you, we'd love to meet. The fine print Zooly Labs is an equal opportunity employer and evaluates candidates without regard to legally protected characteristics. Responsibilities will evolve as the company and product portfolio grow. The role may require occasional travel to design labs, surgeon meetings, suppliers, cadaver studies, or clinical sites. Compensation, equity, benefits, and work-authorization details will be discussed directly. #J-18808-Ljbffr Zooly Labs, Inc