Sr. Applied Research Engineer

Glaukos Corporation•Burlington, MA

About The Position

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced scientist or engineer to join the Applied Research team and advance next-generation technologies within the Corneal Health (CH) product portfolio. This role contributes to early-stage innovation, technology development, and translational research to expand the capabilities and clinical impact of ophthalmic medical device platforms. The position works across experimental science, engineering, and clinical translation to develop new technologies and methodologies, with a focus on imaging and computational approaches for understanding and quantifying corneal structure and biomechanics. The successful candidate will bring expertise in experimental system development, signal processing and algorithm design, and biomechanical modeling, and will help translate research concepts into robust, validated technologies. Responsibilities span device development, corneal imaging and elastography research, experimental system and software development, algorithm validation, cross-functional integration, and communicating technical findings.

Requirements

PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, or a related field, or a bachelor's or master's degree with equivalent industry experience.
5–8+ years of relevant experience; the posting specifies 3–5+ years with an MS degree or 0–4+ years with a PhD, developing biomechanical assays, experimental imaging systems, and quantitative analysis algorithms.
Demonstrated experience with elastography, biomechanical imaging, or quantitative tissue characterization techniques in research or commercial environments.
Strong background in experimental system development, including imaging system design, hardware–software integration, and measurement system validation.
Expertise in signal processing and algorithm development for imaging data.
Strong programming skills in Python or similar scientific programming languages.
Familiarity with medical imaging, ophthalmic technologies, or related biomedical applications.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across disciplines and organizational levels.

Nice To Haves

Experience in regulated medical device settings.
Experience with C++, C#, or other systems-level programming languages.
Experience developing maintainable, well-documented scientific software and transitioning research code into robust implementations.
Experience working with medical device regulations, standards, and technical documentation for regulatory submissions.
Familiarity with machine learning or statistical learning applied to imaging or biomechanical data.

Responsibilities

Contribute to the design and development of current and next-generation ophthalmic medical devices, from early research through translational development.
Design, implement, and experimentally evaluate corneal imaging modalities and elastography approaches, including comparative performance, sensitivity, repeatability, and clinical relevance, to inform system design and future technology directions.
Design, develop, implement, and optimize biomechanical imaging and elastography techniques to assess corneal biomechanical properties and changes resulting from therapeutic interventions such as crosslinking treatments.
Develop, maintain, and refine experimental biomechanical imaging systems, including imaging subsystems, excitation mechanisms, data acquisition hardware, synchronization, and system calibration procedures.
Develop, optimize, and maintain processing and post-processing algorithms and software pipelines for biomedical imaging data.
Ensure processing pipelines are robust, reproducible, and performant across experimental conditions, system configurations, and datasets.
Collaborate with hardware, software, and systems engineering teams to integrate algorithms and experimental methods into prototype and product-level medical devices.
Oversee data collection, preprocessing, algorithm development, validation, and performance characterization through rigorous experimental testing.
Design controlled experiments, phantoms, and validation protocols to compare system performance and biomechanical measurement techniques.
Communicate technical results through design reviews, internal reports, and technical documentation; contribute to publications, patents, or regulatory submissions as appropriate.