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
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who is passionate about building a modern, scalable Data as a Service (DaaS) platform that powers Intuitive’s Digital products and supports over 2,000 engineers across the organization. In this role, you will own and evolve critical components of our real-time and micro-batch data pipelines that power product development, internal tools, and analytics.
Your work will focus on enabling high-throughput, low-latency data delivery through streaming pipelines, dynamic transformations, and APIs, driving application development, AI/ML, and actionable insights. You will help define the architecture and engineering practices that support self-service analytics and operational decision-making on scale.
As a catalyst for change, you will be at the forefront of reimagining how engineering teams consume and interact with data. Long-term success in this role means building robust, efficient systems and replacing legacy processes with modern solutions that allow teams to move faster, with greater confidence and autonomy.
Responsibilities:
- Build highly scalable distributed systems that leverage event-based and streaming data pipelines to handle ingestion and processing of robot, manufacturing, and clinical data
- Enable users by providing self-service APIs and applications to access and interact with data
- Work closely with core engineering teams to consistently evolve data models based on growing business needs
- Apply and evangelize software development best practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and microservice architectures
- Effectively participate in the team’s planning, code reviews, KPI reviews, and design discussions leading to continuous improvement in these areas.
- Act as a technical leader within the data domain driving best practices, mentoring teammates, and continuously improving how data is produced, shared, and consumed across the organization
Qualifications
Skills, Characteristics, and Technology:
- Strong quantitative background (Computer Science, Math, Physics, and/or Engineering), or at least 8-10+ years of industry experience in a quantitative role
- Fluent coding with at least two of the following: Python, Go, Scala, Java, C++
- Proven experience building data pipelines and working with distributed systems using technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, and Airflow
- Deep technical knowledge & experience with Data Platform components/design patterns:
- Event-Driven Pipelines (e.g. AWS Lambda)
- Message Queues (e.g. Kafka)
- Container Orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)
- Stream Processing (e.g. Flink, Spark)
- Relational Databases (e.g. Postgres)
- Data Warehouses (e.g. Snowflake)
- Analytics Engineering (e.g. DBT)
- Workflow Orchestration (e.g. Airflow)
- Search Engines (e.g. Elasticsearch)
- Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows, unit testing and integration testing, and deployment patterns.
- Experience with AWS and/or GCP
- Experience with SQL and relational databases
- Ability and enthusiasm to work collaboratively and cross-functionally, and take end-to-end ownership to deliver results for customers
Bonus points:
- Experience on a Platform team
- Experience with Gitlab CI/CD or other CI tooling
- Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Packer + general IaC best practices
- You enjoyed the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman
- You’re familiar with CNCF projects and have successfully used them in the past
About the Data Services Team:
We are responsible for building, maintaining, and enabling access to high-quality, reliable, and scalable data infrastructure and services. We are looking for strong technical leaders that want an opportunity to develop data products and foundational architecture that will shape the future of Intuitive’s application development, analytics, and AI/ML capabilities.
Additional Information
Intuitive is an Equal Employment 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.
We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with fair chance laws.
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.
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.
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