Staff Software 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 Staff Software Engineer will lead the design and evolution of a modern, scalable Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform that supports Intuitive Digital products and enables more than 2,000 engineers across the organization. This role is responsible for owning and advancing critical components of our real-time and micro-batch data pipelines that power product development, internal tools, and analytics. The engineer will provide architectural direction, influence cross-team data standards, ensure reliability and performance at scale, and drive strategic initiatives that improve developer productivity and data accessibility across the organization.

Major work will focus on enabling high-throughput, low-latency data delivery through streaming pipelines, dynamic transformations, and APIs, driving application development, AI/ML, and actionable insights. You will help define the architecture and engineering practices that support self-service analytics and operational decision-making on scale.

Essential Job Duties

• Build highly scalable distributed systems that leverage event-based and streaming data pipelines to handle ingestion and processing of robot, manufacturing, and clinical data
• Enable users by providing self-service APIs and applications to access and interact with data
• Work closely with core engineering teams to consistently evolve data models based on growing business needs
• Apply and evangelize software development best practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and microservice architectures
• Effectively participate in the team's planning, code reviews, KPI reviews, and design discussions leading to continuous improvement in these areas.
• Act as a technical leader within the data domain driving best practices, mentoring teammates, and continuously improving how data is produced, shared, and consumed across the organization

Qualifications

Required Skills and Experience

• Fluent coding with at least two of the following: Python, Go, Scala, Java, C++
• Proven experience building data pipelines and working with distributed systems using technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, and Airflow
• Deep technical knowledge & experience with Data Platform components/design patterns:Event-Driven Pipelines (e.g. AWS Lambda)Message Queues (e.g. Kafka)Container Orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes) Stream Processing (e.g. Flink, Spark) Relational Databases (e.g. Postgres)Data Warehouses (e.g. Snowflake)Analytics Engineering (e.g. DBT)Workflow Orchestration (e.g. Airflow)Search Engines (e.g. Elasticsearch)
• Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows, unit testing and integration testing, and deployment patterns.
• Experience with AWS and/or GCP
• Experience with SQL and relational databases

Ability and enthusiasm to work collaboratively and cross-functionally, and take end-to-end ownership to deliver results for customers

Required Education and Training

Solid quantitative background in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, or 8-10+ years of hands-on experience in a technically demanding role. Minimum a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience on a Platform team
• Experience with Gitlab CI/CD or other CI tooling
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Packer + general IaC best practices
• You're familiar with CNCF projects and have successfully used them in the past
• Ph.D. in computer science, mathematics, or a related field

Additional Information

Due to the nature of our business and the role, please note that Intuitive and/or your customer(s) may requir