Senior AI/ML Research Engineer – Model development

Company Description

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.

Job Description

Primary Function of Position

We are building advanced augmented dexterity for next-generation robotic platforms. As a Senior AI/ML Research Engineer, you will develop and fine-tune the foundation models—VFMs, VLMs, and VLA models—that let our Embodied-AI system understand the surgical scene and act within it. Within a hierarchical, multimodal stack, you will own the model layer: adapting large pretrained vision and multimodal models on surgical data to extract anatomy, instruments, actions, and context from intraoperative video, and connecting perception to reasoning and action. Partnering with the broader AI/ML team, you will drive the path from offline research to robust, real-time performance in the OR.

Working within Intuitive's Future Forward research organization, you will identify, build, and fine-tune the AI/ML models and algorithms that let us deliver safe and performant embodied-AI systems. This role calls for someone equally comfortable getting hands-on with models and data and designing systems that scale.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Develop, fine-tune, and evaluate the AI/ML models—including foundation and multimodal models—that enable the system to perceive the surgical scene and translate intent and observations into safe, performant behavior.
• Establish strong baselines by reproducing relevant state-of-the-art approaches, then iteratively advance them with in-house models and components while keeping interfaces stable.
• Build and maintain training and data pipelines that combine real demonstration data with simulation, and establish human-in-the-loop pipelines for continuous model improvement.
• Define and run evaluation for model performance, repeatability, and safe failure/abort behavior, and establish the path from offline evaluation on recorded data to robust, real-time integration.
• Partner with data and annotation teams to shape label taxonomies, quality control, and the data pipeline that feeds the models.
• Collaborate across AI/ML research, robotics, software, and data engineering to align on interfaces and deliver models that enable rapid prototyping and learning while building toward a product solution.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field, with 5+ years of applied AI/ML research experience in areas such as robot learning, embodied AI, control, or sequential decision-making.
• Hands-on experience training policies or models from data, including imitation/behavior cloning and reinforcement learning, and fine-tuning pretrained models.
• Experience with vision-action (VA), vision-language-action (VLA), or goal/intent-conditioned models, including models that produce action or control outputs.
• Familiarity with world models and self-supervised predictive architectures (e.g., JEPA-style models, MAE, DINO) for learning dynamics and latent representations to support planning and control.
• Comfort building training and evaluation loops over both simulated and real-world data.
• Strong software and ML-engineering skills in Python and C++, with proficiency in one or more of PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX.
• A research-and-prototyping mindset: comfortable working in ambiguity, framing open-ended problems, running rapid experiments, and reading and reproducing recent papers to pull promising techniques into practice.
• Sound judgment about the path from prototype to product: writing code others can build on, knowing when to optimize versus when to move fast, and thinking ahead about data quality, evaluation, and robustness even at the research stage.
• Solid foundations in linear algebra, probability, and optimization, enough to reason about and debug model behavior from first principles.
• Comfort collaborating across a multidisciplinary team (ML, robotics, software, and clinical/domain experts) and communicating tradeoffs and findings clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Modern policy architectures: diffusion policies, transformer policies, action chunking (e.g., ACT), and generalist robot policies (RT-X / OpenVLA-style).
• DAgger / human-in-the-loop and data-flywheel pipeline experience.
• Sim-to-real transfer and domain randomization (e.g., NVIDIA Isaac Sim).
• Teleoperation, kinematics, and real-time on-robot deployment.
• Publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, or NeurIPS.

Additional Information

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.

Base Compensation Range Region 1: $196 800 USD - $283 200 USD
Base Compensation Range Region 2: $167 300 USD - $240 700 USD
Shift: Day
Workplace Type: Onsite - This job is fully onsite.