Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Platform & OS Upgrades

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

The Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Platform & OS Upgrades will work with a group of talented and dedicated people to improve and extend Intuitive’s surgical robotic product lines. The successful candidate will contribute to the Product Engineering team, with a focused contribution on embedded software for the ION robotic bronchoscopy platform. As a member of the team, you will be involved in supporting and maintaining the existing platform. The successful candidate must excel in a high-energy small, focused team environment, be able to drive to solutions from rough requirements, and have a commitment to high product quality. Quick learning and a desire to understand requirements and create solutions are essential to become a valuable integrator and system developer. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required. Supporting you will be a development and management team that knows and cares about what you are doing and wants you to succeed.

Roles and Responsibilities

Hardware Support and Bring-up:

• Develop, maintain, and upgrade embedded Linux and QNX distributions.
• Integrate secure processes to enhance system security.
• Evaluate and test new hardware for compatibility, performance, reliability, and stability with various operating systems and drivers.
• Support OTA upgrade mechanisms for Linux and QNX platforms, including secure rollback and monitoring capabilities.
• Configure and validate board support packages, kernel drivers, and peripheral devices.

Troubleshooting, Documentation:

• Collaborate with manufacturing and field engineers to investigate, debug, and isolate system software issues.
• Conduct root cause analysis and implement solutions for issues in released and production products.
• Create, document, implement, and unit test software designs in advanced robotic systems.
• Document work in accordance with Intuitive’s development guidelines.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and validate embedded software.

Qualifications

Required Education, Skills & Experience

• Minimum of 8 years of experience and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or related field; or 6 years of experience and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 3 years of experience; or equivalent experience.
• Hands-on embedded software development experience focused on Linux platforms.
• Proficiency in Embedded Yocto Linux development.
• Experience with real-time operating system (RTOS) development, including expertise with QNX Software Development Platform (SDP).
• Experience with UEFI/BIOS, bootloaders (GRUB, U-Boot), secure image signing.
• Experience with Python and developing cross-platform code in C/C++.
• Excellent debugging skills and strong ability to root cause and isolate system issues to component level (Mechanical, hardware, and software).
• Ability to build and maintain relationships across supported organizations.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Secure Boot, TPM, cryptographic workflows.
• Working knowledge of revision control systems such as Git.
• Working knowledge of build systems such as