Primary Function of Position:

As a member of the Future Forward engineering team, you will be tasked with contributing to the implementation of complex surgical robotic functionalities into complete solutions and bringing them to fruition through human use and product release. Your contribution will be focused on the supervisory state machines and software infrastructure, to lay the foundation of a novel surgical robotic architecture.

The successful candidate must excel in a focused, high-energy small-team environment, be able to translate rough and approximate requirements into working prototypes, so to collaborate with the team to arrive at high quality, complete solutions through methodical iterations. Quick learning and a desire to understand requirements from a user’s and engineering’s perspective are essential to become a valuable system developer. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required.

Roles and Responsibilities:

As part of the design team, immediate responsibilities include:

• Design, development and testing of the supervisory state machines that serve as the system’s top-level behavioral command control center, coordinating the real-time control system and user-driven events.

• Integration of the supervisory state machines within the overall system software infrastructure, by leveraging existing components and interfaces that are shared across all Intuitive Surgical robotic systems, to maximize flexibility, modularity, and performance.

• Support prototyping and development activities of novel surgical robotic platforms, by leveraging and adapting the existing C/C++ heterogeneous, multi-processor infrastructure that is shared across all Intuitive robotic systems; learn from each iteration, refine, and extend code quickly and methodically.

• Analysis and quantification of the overall system performance and responsiveness; identification of improvement opportunities, such as reduced latency and increased reliability/determinism.

• Failure mode analysis and implementation of safety mitigations to guarantee safe operation.

• Collaborate to the definition of requirements, specifications, and verification procedures.

Additional responsibilities include:

• Development of a thorough system-level knowledge from a clinical user perspective. • Work on a cross-functional team at multiple levels, understanding needs and requests and weighing them against safety risks and technical constraints.

• Lead the team adoption of object-oriented software modeling and state machine implementation tools.

• Contribution to multiple areas of software development, including but not limited to the following: 

• configuration and monitoring of custom motion control hardware.
• real-time processing performance analysis.
• extension of current processing frameworks to new processors, operating systems, and hardware designs.
• design, development, and extension of offline hardware simulation environments to facilitate rapid software development and testing. 
• development of research prototypes used to evaluate new product concepts.
• design and development of hardware / software diagnostic tools.

• Detailed design, development, documentation, and verification of embedded software, in compliance with regulatory requirements and Intuitive’s internal guidelines.

Skill/Job Requirements:

In order to adequately perform the responsibilities of this position, the individual must meet the following competency requirements (competency is based on education, training, skills and experience):

• Bachelor's, Master's or PhD degree (Master's or PhD degree preferred), with minimum five (5) years of industry experience in developing embedded systems, for Bachelor’s or three (3) years for Master’s degree, or PhD degree.

• Familiarity in top-level state machine development for complex products with human user interface provisions and critical safety considerations.

• Familiarity in developing real-time embedded software for motion-control and robotics (implementation of complex control algorithms into embedded systems) is ideal.

• Experience in object-oriented software architecture, and familiarity with design patterns, is ideal. • Hands-on experience with large cross-platform codebases, toolchains and version control systems is ideal.

• Experience in developing for embedded Linux and/or QNX at multiple levels (hardware bring-up, driver, application, concurrency, and synchronization) is ideal. Familiarity with system modeling tools (e.g., IBM Rhapsody), is a plus.

• Experience in SW support for custom hardware development including diagnostic tests, utilities, and power-on self-tests; experience with scripting languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript, MATLAB, etc.) for diagnostic/test automation is desired.

• Comfort with all phases of the product development lifecycle, including design, implementation, debug, verification, validation, and transfer to manufacturing.

• Experience and comfort with all the phases of with designing software products in an FDA or other regulated industry or for mission critical applications (design input, design output, traceability, and risk analysis) is a plus.

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 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.

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.

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 salary ranges are listed.