AI Scientist- Dept. of Plastic Surgery
Senior or Staff Machine Learning Scientist
Cleveland Clinic is seeking a Senior or Staff Machine Learning Scientist to develop and translate advanced AI solutions across surgery, perioperative care, clinical research, and healthcare operations.
Embedded within the Department of Plastic Surgery and InSITE Research Group, this individual will work directly with surgeons, clinicians, and investigators while collaborating with enterprise AI, engineering, analytics, cloud, and MLOps teams. The role offers a distinctive opportunity to develop AI for the operating room and perioperative environment using surgical video, medical imaging, physiologic signals, sensor data, robotics, electronic health record data, and patient-reported outcomes.
We are seeking a scientist with deep expertise in computer vision, video understanding, or multimodal machine learning, complemented by experience in at least one adjacent area such as generative AI, robotics, predictive modeling, or clinical natural language processing. The successful candidate will contribute across data engineering, model development, rigorous evaluation, clinical validation, and production deployment, helping move high-value projects from clinical need to scalable implementation.
Key Responsibilities
The ideal candidate is an accomplished AI scientist who wants to work closely with surgeons and clinical teams on consequential healthcare problems. This individual will bring recognized expertise in a core technical discipline while remaining versatile enough to contribute across modeling, multimodal data infrastructure, validation, deployment, and research.
The successful candidate will be intellectually curious, collaborative, and comfortable working in the operating room and perioperative environment. They will understand that meaningful surgical AI requires more than model performance. It requires clinical immersion, thoughtful integration of multiple data streams, prospective validation, responsible implementation, and effective human-machine interaction.
Why Join Us
Learn More About Cleveland Clinic
About Cleveland Clinic
Living in Cleveland
Take a Tour
About Us
Cleveland Clinic's vision is to become the best place for care and the best place to work in healthcare. We are committed to providing a safe, stable, and financially fulfilling work environment. Cleveland Clinic is ambitiously investing in growth. Being a physician-led organization means doing what is best for the patients, every day.
Cleveland Clinic is one of the world's largest and busiest health centers. Patients come to Cleveland Clinic from all over the world. We offer advanced treatment for all illnesses and disorders of the body.
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit, multispecialty academic medical center that's recognized in the U.S. and throughout the world for its expertise and care. Cleveland Clinic integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. Among Cleveland Clinic's 80,642 employees worldwide are more than 5,743 salaried physicians and researchers, and 20,166 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,690-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 23 hospitals, more than 270 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2025, there were 15.9 million total outpatient visits, 343,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 336,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic's health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries.
Any application submitted without a CV will delay the review process
Please be advised that all information entered in your application will only be shared with Cleveland Clinic and will not be distributed to third parties.
About The Community
Cleveland is part of Northeast Ohio which is composed of six metropolitan areas. Each of them provides affordable real estate, excellent schools, safe communities as well as an abundance of outdoor activities. Find out here how great it is to live in Cleveland!
Information for Candidates
Candidates will only be asked to provide personal documents once an offer of employment has been made and accepted. Recruitment scams are becoming increasingly common online, with false advertisements, impersonation, and requests for payment or personal details claiming to come from reputable organizations. Please be assured that our physician recruiters will never ask for payment from candidates at any stage of the recruitment or offer process. Additionally, all email communication will come from a Cleveland Clinic email address.
Disclaimer
The policy of Cleveland Clinic Health System and its system hospitals (Cleveland Clinic Health System) is to provide equal opportunity to all of our caregivers and applicants for employment in our drug free environment. All offers of employment are followed by testing for controlled substances.
Cleveland Clinic Health System administers an influenza prevention program. You will be required to comply with this program, which will include obtaining an influenza vaccination on an annual basis or obtaining an approved exemption.
Decisions concerning employment, transfers and promotions are made upon the basis of the best qualified candidate without regard to color, race, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, status as a disabled or Vietnam era veteran or any other characteristic protected by law. Information provided on this application may be shared with any Cleveland Clinic Health System facility.
Cleveland Clinic is pleased to be an equal employment opportunity employer.
The salary range displayed in this job posting reflects the anticipated salary range for new physicians hired into full-time (100% FTE) positions. This range is generally aligned with or below the 50th percentile of nationally recognized compensation benchmarks by specialty. A successful candidate's actual compensation will be determined in accordance with fair market value, considering factors such as professional experience, clinical expertise, board certification, work history, and FTE. This stated range excludes the value of Cleveland Clinic's comprehensive benefits package, which includes healthcare, dental, vision, retirement, and other offerings.
Pay Range
Minimum salary: $100
Maximum salary: $200
Cleveland Clinic is seeking a Senior or Staff Machine Learning Scientist to develop and translate advanced AI solutions across surgery, perioperative care, clinical research, and healthcare operations.
Embedded within the Department of Plastic Surgery and InSITE Research Group, this individual will work directly with surgeons, clinicians, and investigators while collaborating with enterprise AI, engineering, analytics, cloud, and MLOps teams. The role offers a distinctive opportunity to develop AI for the operating room and perioperative environment using surgical video, medical imaging, physiologic signals, sensor data, robotics, electronic health record data, and patient-reported outcomes.
We are seeking a scientist with deep expertise in computer vision, video understanding, or multimodal machine learning, complemented by experience in at least one adjacent area such as generative AI, robotics, predictive modeling, or clinical natural language processing. The successful candidate will contribute across data engineering, model development, rigorous evaluation, clinical validation, and production deployment, helping move high-value projects from clinical need to scalable implementation.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and validate machine learning models for surgical, perioperative, clinical, and operational applications.
- Advance computer vision, multimodal learning, generative AI, predictive modeling, and real-time clinical decision support.
- Develop machine learning systems using time-synchronized surgical video, medical imaging, physiologic waveforms, device and sensor streams, robotic telemetry, longitudinal electronic health record data, and patient-reported outcomes.
- Create methods to recognize surgical phases, anatomy, instruments, events, workflow, and the evolving state of the operating room.
- Build and extend reusable technical infrastructure for surgical intelligence, including multimodal data ingestion and synchronization, data quality controls, annotation and labeling workflows, dataset versioning, reproducible training pipelines, model evaluation, prospective validation, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring.
- Explore physical AI applications that connect perception, prediction, and action through intelligent surgical systems, robotics, sensor-enabled environments, and human-machine collaboration.
- Collaborate on emerging approaches such as world models, vision-language-action models, and reinforcement learning for surgical and perioperative environments.
- Develop AI solutions addressing surgical safety, quality, patient-reported outcomes, operations, documentation, and perioperative efficiency.
- Translate clinical and operational needs into technically rigorous projects with clear data requirements, validation strategies, and measures of success.
- Provide technical leadership across multidisciplinary projects by shaping system architecture, establishing evaluation standards, reviewing technical work, and coordinating clinicians, researchers, data engineers, ML engineers, enterprise platform teams, and external collaborators from early development through implementation.
- Contribute to peer-reviewed publications, presentations, grants, and collaborative research.
- Apply responsible and human-centered AI practices throughout development and clinical translation, including privacy-preserving data use, bias and subgroup evaluation, interpretability appropriate to the use case, uncertainty communication, human-factors assessment, documentation, and clearly defined human oversight.
- PhD in computer science, engineering, data science, biomedical informatics, robotics, applied mathematics, statistics, or a related quantitative field.
- Advanced knowledge of machine learning and deep learning, with demonstrated depth in at least one relevant technical area and the ability to select appropriate methods, design rigorous experiments, diagnose failure modes, and evaluate whether model performance is sufficient for the intended clinical or operational use.
- Strong proficiency in Python and demonstrated ability to develop maintainable, tested machine learning software using modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX; experience with relevant model and data ecosystems, including Hugging Face where appropriate.
- Demonstrated experience developing and validating machine learning models using complex real-world data.
- Ability to communicate effectively and collaborate with clinicians, researchers, engineers, and operational leaders.
- Strong record of independent technical problem-solving and multidisciplinary teamwork.
- Experience with surgical video, medical imaging, physiologic signals, sensor fusion, robotic systems, electronic health record data, or patient-reported outcomes.
- Experience developing models for real-time or safety-sensitive environments.
- Experience with temporal modeling, surgical phase recognition, or human-machine interaction.
- Experience with cloud AI platforms, Databricks, scalable data pipelines, or distributed computing.
- Experience with MLOps, including model deployment, monitoring, reproducibility, and lifecycle management.
- Experience translating AI research into clinical, operational, or other real-world environments.
- Familiarity with responsible AI, privacy, security, data governance, and validation in regulated settings.
- Strong publication, applied research, or AI product development record.
- Experience coordinating engineers, data scientists, or external technical collaborators.
The ideal candidate is an accomplished AI scientist who wants to work closely with surgeons and clinical teams on consequential healthcare problems. This individual will bring recognized expertise in a core technical discipline while remaining versatile enough to contribute across modeling, multimodal data infrastructure, validation, deployment, and research.
The successful candidate will be intellectually curious, collaborative, and comfortable working in the operating room and perioperative environment. They will understand that meaningful surgical AI requires more than model performance. It requires clinical immersion, thoughtful integration of multiple data streams, prospective validation, responsible implementation, and effective human-machine interaction.
Why Join Us
- Develop AI directly within the operating room and perioperative environment.
- Advance computer vision, multimodal AI, physical AI, surgical intelligence, and personalized decision support
- Build intelligent systems integrating surgical video, imaging, physiologic, sensor, robotic, and clinical data.
- Shape emerging applications of robotics, embodied intelligence, and human-machine collaboration in surgery.
- Develop AI across the continuum from research concept to clinical or operational implementation.
- Build platforms that can extend across projects, procedures, and specialties.
- Collaborate with leading clinical, research, enterprise AI, engineering, and external technology teams.
- Combine publication-quality research with meaningful clinical impact.
Learn More About Cleveland Clinic
About Cleveland Clinic
Living in Cleveland
Take a Tour
About Us
Cleveland Clinic's vision is to become the best place for care and the best place to work in healthcare. We are committed to providing a safe, stable, and financially fulfilling work environment. Cleveland Clinic is ambitiously investing in growth. Being a physician-led organization means doing what is best for the patients, every day.
Cleveland Clinic is one of the world's largest and busiest health centers. Patients come to Cleveland Clinic from all over the world. We offer advanced treatment for all illnesses and disorders of the body.
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit, multispecialty academic medical center that's recognized in the U.S. and throughout the world for its expertise and care. Cleveland Clinic integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. Among Cleveland Clinic's 80,642 employees worldwide are more than 5,743 salaried physicians and researchers, and 20,166 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,690-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 23 hospitals, more than 270 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2025, there were 15.9 million total outpatient visits, 343,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 336,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic's health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries.
Any application submitted without a CV will delay the review process
Please be advised that all information entered in your application will only be shared with Cleveland Clinic and will not be distributed to third parties.
About The Community
Cleveland is part of Northeast Ohio which is composed of six metropolitan areas. Each of them provides affordable real estate, excellent schools, safe communities as well as an abundance of outdoor activities. Find out here how great it is to live in Cleveland!
Information for Candidates
Candidates will only be asked to provide personal documents once an offer of employment has been made and accepted. Recruitment scams are becoming increasingly common online, with false advertisements, impersonation, and requests for payment or personal details claiming to come from reputable organizations. Please be assured that our physician recruiters will never ask for payment from candidates at any stage of the recruitment or offer process. Additionally, all email communication will come from a Cleveland Clinic email address.
Disclaimer
The policy of Cleveland Clinic Health System and its system hospitals (Cleveland Clinic Health System) is to provide equal opportunity to all of our caregivers and applicants for employment in our drug free environment. All offers of employment are followed by testing for controlled substances.
Cleveland Clinic Health System administers an influenza prevention program. You will be required to comply with this program, which will include obtaining an influenza vaccination on an annual basis or obtaining an approved exemption.
Decisions concerning employment, transfers and promotions are made upon the basis of the best qualified candidate without regard to color, race, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, status as a disabled or Vietnam era veteran or any other characteristic protected by law. Information provided on this application may be shared with any Cleveland Clinic Health System facility.
Cleveland Clinic is pleased to be an equal employment opportunity employer.
The salary range displayed in this job posting reflects the anticipated salary range for new physicians hired into full-time (100% FTE) positions. This range is generally aligned with or below the 50th percentile of nationally recognized compensation benchmarks by specialty. A successful candidate's actual compensation will be determined in accordance with fair market value, considering factors such as professional experience, clinical expertise, board certification, work history, and FTE. This stated range excludes the value of Cleveland Clinic's comprehensive benefits package, which includes healthcare, dental, vision, retirement, and other offerings.
Pay Range
Minimum salary: $100
Maximum salary: $200
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