Staff Machine Learning Engineer

It started with a simple idea: what if surgery could be less invasive and recovery less painful? Nearly 30 years later, that question still fuels everything we do at Intuitive. As a global leader in robotic-assisted surgery and minimally invasive care, our technologies—like the da Vinci surgical system and Ion—have transformed how care is delivered for millions of patients worldwide.

We’re a team of engineers, clinicians, and innovators united by one purpose: to make surgery smarter, safer, and more human. Every day, our work helps care teams perform with greater precision and patients recover faster, improving outcomes around the world.

The problems we solve demand creativity, rigor, and collaboration. The work is challenging, but deeply meaningful—because every improvement we make has the potential to change a life.

If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare, you’ll find your purpose here.

Primary Function of Position

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will be responsible for developing and delivering novel machine learning solutions for multimodal, physical AI, robotic systems. You will work alongside research, engineering, regulatory, product and clinical teams to develop and test algorithms and translate them into robust, validated and scalable medical device software and infrastructures.

Responsibilities

• Independently lead projects to improve key metrics at program-level and product-level of model performance tracked throughout the development life cycle of AI/ ML product solutions

• Design, implement and optimize structured experimentation across model architectures, datasets, and training strategies for vision foundation model-driven solutions

• Update and improve primary machine learning models - inform and follow through required data collections and testing for both internal and external regulatory milestones.

• Optimize and validate models for integration into production systems, ensuring performance in real-world clinical settings. This position will be primarily focused on vision foundation models, but may extend to other (language, action, predictive, physical AI, etc)

• Design and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines spanning data collection, data curation, synthetic data generation, model training, evaluation, validation, and integration into robotic platform workflows. Implement semi-supervised and self-supervised methods and pipelines to reduce image annotation burden. Develop tools, pipeline, framework and applications to be deployed and scaled.

• Collaborate with physicians and product teams to ensure clinical relevance, robustness and usability of models

• Stay up to date with latest CV/ML/VLA/encoding/predictive/generative AI literature, use this to inform research and product direction

• Participate in integration of new ML/CV algorithms into existing and future robotic platforms; delivering high-quality, production-ready code in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.

Required Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, or a related technical field.

• 7+ years of industry experience developing machine learning, robotics, computer vision, simulation, or autonomous-systems software; or 4+ years of industry experience with a PhD

• Previously deployed CV/ML projects to users/ customers

• Fluent in Python and experience with ML frameworks and models (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX), C/C++ (proficiency)

• Strong background with hands-on experience of modern deep learning and multimodal vision-language, transformer-based architectures, including self-supervised and predictive foundation-model adaptation and fine-tuning (e.g. JEPA-style models, MAE, DINO, contrastive learning, etc) for improved perception

• Proven cross-functional technical leadership in clinical translation (ability to align research, engineering and product stakeholders around an architecture)

• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex ML engineering projects from concept through implementation, validation, and integration with users, engineering platforms, or deployed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with regulatory-aware AI/ML development, design controls, safety risk analysis, software validation, quality systems, HIPAA, FDA expectations, or data governance in healthcare, medical devices, surgical robotics or other regulated environments.

• Familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) and scaling ML systems in production

• Experience with CI/CD and MLOps pipelines for automated model deployment and monitoring

• Proficiency in GPU optimization for either inference or rendering

• Track record of publications, patents, open-source contributions, or productized systems in robotics, machine learning, computer vision, medical imaging, surgical robotics, or physical AI.

• Experience collaborating with clinicians, clinical advisors, human factors teams, regulatory teams, or product teams to ensure clinically meaningful model performance.

Due to the nature of our business and the role, please note that Intuitive and/or your customer(s) may require that you show current proof of vaccination against certain diseases including COVID-19.  Details can vary by role.

Intuitive is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees, and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, without regard to race, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, religion, protected veteran or disability status, genetic information or any other status protected under federal, state, or local applicable laws.

Mandatory Notices

U.S. Export Controls Disclaimer:  In accordance with the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (15 CFR §743.13(b)), some roles at Intuitive Surgical may be subject to U.S. export controls for prospective employees
who are nationals from countries currently on embargo or sanctions status.

Certain information you provide as part of the application will be used for purposes of determining whether Intuitive Surgical will need to (i) obtain an export license from the U.S. Government on your behalf (note: the government’s licensing process can take 3 to 6+ months) or (ii) implement a Technology Control Plan (“TCP”) (note: typically adds 2 weeks to the hiring process).  

For any Intuitive role subject to export controls, final offers are contingent upon obtaining an approved export license and/or an executed TCP prior to the prospective employee’s
start date, which may or may not be flexible, and within a timeframe that does not unreasonably impede the hiring need. If applicable, candidates will be notified and instructed on any requirements for these purposes. 

We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with fair chance laws.

Preference will be given to qualified candidates who do not reside, or plan to reside, in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, or Tennessee.

This position may be filled at a different job level than listed here depending on
business need and/or on the selected candidate’s experience, knowledge and skills.
Compensation will be based primarily on the job level at which the role is filled and the
candidate’s qualifications, consistent with applicable law.

We provide market-competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base pay, incentives, benefits, and equity. It would not be typical for someone to be hired at the top end of range for the role, as actual pay will be determined based on several factors, including experience, skills, and qualifications. The target compensation ranges are listed.