Senior AI/ML Research Engineer – Model development

Intuitive; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive in Sunnyvale, CA seeks a Senior AI/ML Research Engineer to develop and fine-tune foundation models for Embodied-AI in the operating room. You will adapt vision and multimodal models to extract anatomy, instruments, actions, and context from intraoperative video and connect perception to reasoning and action.

You will collaborate with the AI/ML, robotics, software and data teams to scale models from offline research to real-time performance in the OR, balancing hands-on modeling with

Responsibilities

• Develop, fine-tune, and evaluate the AI/ML models—including foundation and multimodal models—that enable the system to perceive the surgical scene and translate intent and observations into safe, performant behavior.
• Establish strong baselines by reproducing relevant state‑of‑the‑art approaches, then iteratively advance them with in‑house models and components while keeping interfaces stable.
• Build and maintain training and data pipelines that combine real demonstration data with simulation, and establish human‑in‑the‑loop pipelines for continuous model improvement.
• Define and run evaluation for model performance, repeatability, and safe failure/abort behavior, and establish the path from offline evaluation on recorded data to robust, real‑time integration.
• Partner with data and annotation teams to shape label taxonomies, quality control, and the data pipeline that feeds the models.
• Collaborate across AI/ML research, robotics, software, and data engineering to align on interfaces and deliver models that enable rapid prototyping and learning while building toward a product solution.

Job description

Job Description

Primary Function of Position

We are building advanced augmented dexterity for next-generation robotic platforms. As a Senior AI/ML Research Engineer, you will develop and fine-tune the foundation models—VFMs, VLMs, and VLA models—that let our Embodied-AI system understand the surgical scene and act within it. Within a hierarchical, multimodal stack, you will own the model layer: adapting large pretrained vision and multimodal models on surgical data to extract anatomy, instruments, actions, and context from intraoperative video, and connecting perception to reasoning and action. Partnering with the broader AI/ML team, you will drive the path from offline research to robust, real-time performance in the OR.

Working within Intuitive's Future Forward research organization, you will identify, build, and fine-tune the AI/ML models and algorithms that let us deliver safe and performant embodied-AI systems. This role calls for someone equally comfortable getting hands-on with models and data and designing systems that scale.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Develop, fine-tune, and evaluate the AI/ML models—including foundation and multimodal models—that enable the system to perceive the surgical scene and translate intent and observations into safe, performant behavior.
• Establish strong baselines by reproducing relevant state‑of‑the‑art approaches, then iteratively advance them with in‑house models and components while keeping interfaces stable.
• Build and maintain training and data pipelines that combine real demonstration data with simulation, and establish human‑in‑the‑loop pipelines for continuous model improvement.
• Define and run evaluation for model performance, repeatability, and safe failure/abort behavior, and establish the path from offline evaluation on recorded data to robust, real‑time integration.
• Partner with data and annotation teams to shape label taxonomies, quality control, and the data pipeline that feeds the models.
• Collaborate across AI/ML research, robotics, software, and data engineering to align on interfaces and deliver models that enable rapid prototyping and learning while building toward a product solution.