Senior AI/ML Research Engineer — Surgical Robotics

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

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