Intuitive Surgical, Inc

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Intuitive Surgical, Inc$140K — $180K *
Healthcare
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • PhD or Master's in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field
  • 7+ years of industry experience in ML, robotics, or computer vision development; or 4+ years with a PhD
  • Experience with deployed CV/ML projects
  • Proficient in Python and experienced with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) and C/C++
  • Strong expertise in deep learning and multimodal vision-language architectures
  • Proven technical leadership in clinical translation and multi-disciplinary collaboration
  • Experience managing complex ML engineering projects from inception to deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Lead projects to improve AI model performance metrics at program and product levels
  • Design and optimize structured experimentation for vision foundation model solutions
  • Update and improve machine learning models, including data collection and testing for regulatory milestones
  • Optimize models for real-world clinical integration across various AI domains
  • Maintain end-to-end ML pipelines, implementing semi-supervised methods to ease image annotation
  • Collaborate with clinical teams to ensure model relevance and usability
  • Stay abreast of advancements in CV/ML literature to guide research and product strategies.

Benefits

  • Market-competitive compensation packages including base pay, incentives, and equity
  • Comprehensive benefits package
  • Opportunity to work in a fast-paced and innovative medical technology environment
  • Collaborative atmosphere with access to interdisciplinary teams ranging from research to clinical settings.
  • Potential for career advancement within a dynamic company focused on cutting-edge technology.
Full Job Description
Job Description

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.


Qualifications

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.


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.

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.

About Intuitive Surgical, Inc

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. is an American corporation that develops, manufactures, and markets robotic products designed to improve clinical outcomes of patients through minimally invasive surgery, most notably with the da Vinci Surgical System. The company is part of the NASDAQ-100 and S&P 500. Intuitive Surgical has installed more than 5,000 surgical systems worldwide, and has more than 4,000 employees.
Learn more about Intuitive Surgical, Inc
Size
9,793 employees
Market Cap
$93.6 billion
Industry
Net Income
$1 billion
Founded
1999
5 Year Trend
+16.1%
Revenue
$4.3 billion
NASDAQ

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