Sr. Interaction Designer

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

Interaction Design is a key role at Intuitive, spanning multiple technical disciplines to craft user-friendly experiences for complex medical devices. We bring human-centered design to healthcare innovation and to the development of safe, effective, and confidence-inspiring robotic interfaces.

As a Senior Interaction Designer on the Future Forward team, you will drive design work and product innovation for the company’s new product development projects. You will be involved in all stages of product development from early concepting to final design and implementation, collaborating closely with other designers, software and mechanical engineers, product managers, and clinical teams such as Human Factors and Clinical Research Engineering.

This full-time on-site position is based in our Sunnyvale, CA office.

Roles & Responsibilities

About You

• You are a human-centered designer motivated by the opportunity to improve the life of patients and tackle novel challenges in healthcare
• You thrive in highly technical domains, enjoying abstract and often unfamiliar design problems
• You are methodical and drive design decisions through insights and iteration
• You value design craftsmanship, recognize quality, and expect high standards
• You believe in collaboration, knowing that success hinges on working closely with other designers and cross-functional partners
• You are emotionally intelligent and have excellent listening, communication and analytical skills that help you to adapt in a dynamic, cross-functional environment

What You’ll Do

• Design world-class physical and digital interfaces, upholding superior design standards and methods to deliver product experiences that push the frontier of human-computer interaction.
   
• Define the behavior of interactive systems, driven by evidence and deep problem understanding, exploring, prototyping and iterating through various designs to systematically narrow the solution space.
   
• Deliver design solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable, proposing and articulating clear and compelling design solutions with sound rationales. You will take part in evolving the product’s design language to produce beautiful and functional interfaces.
   
• Contribute to design documentation and testing, writing clear, comprehensive and detailed user interface specifications for others to build and test against. Consider potential safety and usability risks together with our Human Factors Engineers and design necessary mitigations.

Qualifications

Qualifications

Required Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of product design or related field experience (in-house, agency, or freelance work)
• Expertise in physical or embedded interaction design (beyond web or mobile app interfaces)
• Proficiency in current design tools and software applications

Required Education and Training

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or equivalent

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience designing for 3D and AR/VR interactions
• Expertise in motion design and animation
• Strong high-fidelity prototyping abilities (E.g. Unity or Protopie)
• Demonstrated systems thinking and experience designing for scalability across a product ecosystem
• Ability to articulate design concisely to leadership and stakeholders
• Excellent UX documentation writing ski