Senior Simulation Data Scientist, Robotics Motion AI

Intuitive; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 182,000 - 309,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive Surgical in San Francisco seeks a Staff Data Scientist – Simulation Motion AI to design scalable data systems for training robotic policies in safety‑critical motion AI products.

You will work with cross‑functional teams to generate synthetic data, train and test algorithms in simulation at scale, and advance data pipelines using Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, and related tools.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree in a related technical field.
• 9+ years of industry experience in simulation, ML, robotics, or related software; or 4+ years with a PhD.
• Hands-on experience with robotics simulation platforms (Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo).
• Experience creating custom simulation environments, robot assets, task definitions, sensors, or scene-generation systems.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch.
• Experience with robot kinematics, dynamics, coordinates, calibration, trajectories, and closed-loop control for ML datasets.
• Ability to diagnose model failures with quantitative analysis.
• Experience deploying/validating models on physical robotic systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable pipelines for synthetic and varied robotic interaction data.
• Develop scalable simulation environments and data-generation curricula.
• Generate recovery data for rare but safety-critical conditions.
• Design systems to replay, perturb, and extend real-world trajectories in simulation.
• Establish provenance, metadata, versioning, and reproducibility standards for datasets.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Robotics simulation

Kinematics & dynamics

Trajectory representations

Closed-loop control

Datasets & experiments

Quantitative failure diagnosis

Physical robotics deployment

Education

PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, robotics, machine learning, data science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, or related field

Tools

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

NVIDIA Isaac Lab

MuJoCo

Job description

Intuitive Surgical in San Francisco seeks a Staff Data Scientist – Simulation Motion AI to design scalable data systems for training robotic policies in safety‑critical motion AI products.

You will work with cross‑functional teams to generate synthetic data, train and test algorithms in simulation at scale, and advance data pipelines using Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, and related tools.