Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

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

Primary Function of Position

The Sr. Mechanical Engineer will conceptualize, develop, and verify new mechanical design concepts for next generation of minimally invasive surgical robot systems. You will apply your product development expertise to next generation da Vinci designs leveraging your creativity and engineering analysis to the design of kinematics, robotic actuation and sensing solutions.  The successful candidate will have both the technical depth to resolve complex mechanical, materials and manufacturing design issues and the ability to work in an interdisciplinary team to troubleshoot to root cause higher level system issues.  This requires in-depth collaboration with cross-functional teams that will routinely leverage your technical and interpersonal skills as you develop a shared understanding of the new product requirements.

Essential Job Duties

• Designing components and producing mechanical drawings for prototype assemblies and builds.  Design and development of testing and assembly fixtures and methods to support the product development cycle.
• Should have familiarity with volume manufacturing processes which may include cast metal, injection molded plastic, sheet metal stamping, and others.
• Analyze and test product prototype designs, critically analyze results, for structure, dynamics, and thermal issues and share results with the engineering team.
• Provide written protocols, reports, drawings, specifications, presentations, and perform technical design reviews to solicit feedback on design activities on an ongoing basis.
• Development and documentation of mechanical design and manufacturing documentation including: inspection procedures, assembly instructions, new manufacturing processes, test methods, purchase specifications, BOMs, component / assembly drawings per the company’s operating procedures.
• Create and maintain SolidWorks CAD databases, including assemblies, components, and detailed drawings.
• Contribute to and make decisions based on risk assessments, industry standards, and regulatory frameworks.
• Observe pre-clinical and clinical cases and interface with clinical experts to inform designs and identify user needs.
• Document, prepare and review patent submissions.
• Familiarity with working in a government regulated environment such as for FDA filings. Exposure to design controls and component verifications.  for volume manufacturing processes which may include cast metal, injection molded plastic, sheet metal stamped, and others.
• Working within multi-disciplinary teams to define requirements for new and current product designs.
• Rapid development and iteration of full-scale prototypes of candidate architectures to satisfy requirements.

Qualifications

Required Skills and Experience

•     Minimum 6 years of experience developing commercial medical products.

•     Demonstrated ability to work in cross-functional research and development teams and lead sub-system activities coordinating with other team members.

•     Evaluate designs via prototype testing and rigorous mathematical analysis.

•     Investigating and determining root cause failures in both latent and emerging designs.

•     Experience with metals, plastics, fabrication methods, plastics molding, MIM, castings, extrusions, sheet metal, bonding and adhesives.

•     Proficiency using CAD to design and document designs; SolidWorks preferred.

•     Experience with GD&T and other related ASME/ISO drafting standards and tolerance stack analysis.

•     Experience with all phases of the product development lifecycle including design, implementation, debug, verification, qualifi