Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering - Digital, Data & Applications

Company Description

At Intuitive, we are united behind our mission: we believe that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. Through ingenuity and intelligent technology, we expand the potential of physicians to heal without constraints.
As a pioneer and market leader in robotic-assisted surgery, we strive to foster an inclusive and diverse team, committed to making a difference. For more than 25 years, we have worked with hospitals and care teams around the world to help solve some of healthcare's hardest challenges and advance what is possible.
Intuitive has been built by the efforts of great people from diverse backgrounds. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere. We strive to foster an inclusive culture built around diversity of thought and mutual respect. We lead with inclusion and empower our team members to do their best work as their most authentic selves.
Passionate people who want to make a difference drive our culture. Our team members are grounded in integrity, have a strong capacity to learn, the energy to get things done, and bring diverse, real world experiences to help us think in new ways. We actively invest in our team members to support their long-term growth so they can continue to advance our mission and achieve their highest potential.
Join a team committed to taking big leaps forward for a global community of healthcare professionals and their patients. Together, let's advance the world of minimally invasive care.

Job Description

Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer on Intuitive’s Platform Engineering team, you will architect and build a next-generation automation platform that bridges our digital products with robotic systems. You’ll design and implement automated pipelines—spanning AI/ML model training and deployment, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop environments, and cloud data ingestion—to drive improved software reliability, faster iteration, and enhanced visibility for our web and mobile applications. This role requires a balance of hands-on engineering, architectural leadership, and cross-functional collaboration with software, SDET, and DevOps teams.

Key Responsibilities

CI/CD & Automation:

• Architect, implement, and maintain end-to-end build, test, and deployment pipelines for digital products and AI/ML workflows, all integrated with robotic platforms.
• Develop reusable automation frameworks and scripts (Python, shell, etc.) to reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and accelerate delivery.
• Design and extend Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar tooling to enforce consistent quality gates (static insights, unit tests, integration tests) before every release.

Integration & Reliability:

• Act as a true systems engineer and drive efforts to integrate hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing of our edge devices with simulator-based test suites that validate edge-device interactions with robotic systems and cloud-native solutions.
• Build processes to ingest test results and telemetry data into a scalable cloud data pipeline (AWS/GCP) for real-time insights and visualization of software reliability metrics.
• Collaborate with embedded and digital teams to ensure consistent interfaces between edge devices, cloud services, and client-facing applications.
• Leverage AI/ML tools, data analytics, and predictive modeling to enhance pipeline reliability, automate anomaly detection, optimize test coverage, and enable data-driven decision making through real-time monitoring and actionable insights derived from pipeline and test execution data.

Collaboration & Enablement:

• Serve as a technical mentor to DevOps engineers, SDETs, and SWE peers—conduct design reviews, share best practices, and encourage incremental improvements.
• Facilitate cross-team workshops or design sessions that align hardware, software, and QA roadmaps; translate complex requirements into automated test strategies.
• Act as the primary point of contact for integration questions—help unblock teams by clarifying dependencies, reviewing architecture proposals, and advocating for automation first.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in DevOps, release engineering, configuration management, or related software development discipline.
• Proven track record building and operating CI/CD pipelines for distributed systems (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI).
• Expert in Python (scripting, automation frameworks) and comfortable authoring build/test tooling.
• Proven experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and integrating containers into CI/CD workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to write and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudF