Staff AI/ML Architect, Embodied AI

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.

The Future Forward organization is Intuitive’s advanced concepts group. We explore emerging technologies, prototype next-generation solutions, and build software experiences that shape the future of robotic-assisted surgery.

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 capabilities for next-generation robotic platforms. As a Staff AI/ML Architect, you will own the end-to-end architecture of our applied-AI system: a hierarchical, multimodal stack in which a high-level model interprets sensory observations and produces structured intent, and a low-level policy turns that intent into precise, safe, real-time control. You will set the technical direction the rest of the AI/ML team builds against, define the interfaces between perception, reasoning, and control, and make the architecture decisions that let us move safely from offline research to real-time deployment.

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

Roles and Responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end architecture for a hierarchical perception, reasoning, and control AI system.
• Specify the contracts between layers: model outputs, policy interfaces, timing budgets, and safety hooks, and keep them stable as components are swapped and upgraded.
• Make the build and modular-vs-monolithic calls, evaluate in-house approaches against the state of the art and set the target architecture.
• Establish the path from offline evaluation on recorded data to real-time integration, including the continuous-improvement (human-in-the-loop) data loop.
• Partner across research, engineering, data, and product teams, mentor senior scientists/engineers and raise the engineering bar across the effort.
• Partner with AI/ML researchers, robotics, data engineers, and other stakeholders to deliver a modular architecture that enables rapid prototyping and learning while working toward a product solution.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field with 10+ years building AI/ML models and algorithms for autonomous-systems software, with demonstrated ownership of an end-to-end AI/ML system architecture taken to production or to a rigorous prototype.
• Deep experience with hierarchical, modular AI/ML or robot-learning stacks, including high-level reasoning paired with low-level control policies.
• Strong grasp of real-time and safety-critical ML: latency budgets, failure modes, fallback/abort behavior, and interface/contract design across components.
• Hands-on expertise with modern deep learning and multimodal, vision-language, LLM-based architectures, including vision foundation models (VFM), vision-action (VA), and vision-language-action (VLA) models.
• Fluency in one of PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, and in Python and C++, is required.
• Working knowledge of world-model and self-supervised predictive architectures (e.g., JEPA-style models, MAE, DINO) and how learned world models inform perception-and-control design.
• Solid foundations in linear algebra, probability, and optimization, enough to reason about and debug model behavior from first principles.
• Proven cross-functional technical leadership (able to align research, engineering, and product stakeholders around an architecture).

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in healthcare, medical devices, surgical robotics, or other regulated technical domains.
• Foundation-model adaptation and fine-tuning for embodied robotics tasks.
• Experience delivering AI/ML in a real-time, safety-critical domain.
• Imitation learning, DAgger, and/or reinforcement learning at system scale.
• Sim-to-real workflows and experience with robotics simulators (e.g., NVIDIA Isaac Sim).
• Regulatory-aware AI/ML development for regulated, safety-critical industries.
• Triton kernel and/or CUDA development experiences
• Publications or recognized contributions at venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS, CoRL, RSS, or ICRA.
• Awareness of data governance in regulated environments (HIPAA, FDA).

Additional Information

• Travel: Minimal
• Ways of Working: Onsite, 5 days per week
• Reports to: Govind Payyavula, Senior Managing Principal – Future Forward Research
• Compensation: Competitive salary, annual bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits

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: $229,600 USD - $330,400 USD
Base Compensation Range Region 2: $195,200 USD - $280,800 USD
Shift: Day
Workplace Type: Onsite - This job is fully onsite.