Sr. AI & Automation Engineer, Robotics

Intuitive; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive's Future Forward organization is seeking a Senior AI & Automation Engineer to build AI tools, automation systems, and evaluation capabilities that help researchers and engineers train, test, and evaluate models faster on real robots.

You will leverage existing AI technologies while developing new solutions—agent-driven workflows, APIs, and automation frameworks that support engineering and research activities.

Qualifications

• AI tooling and automation experience in research environments.
• Ability to design and implement automation for experiments and data workflows.
• Experience with integrating AI tools and engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and integrate AI tools, APIs, and agent workflows that automate engineering and research work across the team.
• Automate the training and fine-tuning workflow, from setting up experiments to launching, tracking, and comparing runs.
• Build automation and integration workflows that help researchers and engineers evaluate new ideas in simulation and on real robots, quickly, reliably, and at scale.
• Design evaluations and experiments that show, with statistical confidence, whether a change is a real improvement.
• Build logging, analysis, and debugging tools that help the team understand results and failures, and that turn robot sessions into data the team can train on.
• Make what you build reliable, secure, and safe to run, with human approval where it matters and responsible use of AI throughout.
• Evaluate emerging AI tools, models, and technologies, and bring in the ones that deliver measurable impact.
• Measure the impact of what you build, document it clearly, and make successful tools part of how the team operates.

Skills

AI tooling

Automation

APIs

Simulation

Data analysis

Job description

Job Description

About the Team

The Future Forward organization is Intuitive's advanced concepts group. We explore emerging
technologies, prototype next-generation solutions, and build software experiences that shape
the future of robotic-assisted surgery. Our research team is building advanced augmented
dexterity capabilities for next-generation robotic platforms.

The Role

Our researchers should spend their time on ideas, not on the manual work required to turn
those ideas into results on real robots.

As a Senior AI & Automation Engineer, you will build the AI tools, automation systems,
integrations, and evaluation capabilities that help researchers and engineers train, test, and
evaluate models faster and make better decisions. You'll leverage existing AI technologies while
developing new solutions, from agent-driven workflows and AI tooling to the APIs, services, and
automation frameworks that support engineering and research activities.

That could mean agents that set up and run experiments, automation workflows that accelerate
testing and evaluation, or tools that sort through logs and video to help teams understand
failures and improve outcomes. It's a hands-on engineering role that uses AI to improve how
physical AI systems are trained and tested. You'll automate that work; you won't design the
models themselves. You'll work closely with ML researchers, simulation engineers, and robotics
engineers.

What You'll Do

• Build and integrate AI tools, APIs, and agent workflows that automate engineering and
  research work across the team.


• Automate the training and fine-tuning workflow, from setting up experiments to
  launching, tracking, and comparing runs, so researchers can reproduce results without
  hand-built scripts.


• Build automation and integration workflows that help researchers and engineers
  evaluate new ideas in simulation and on real robots, quickly, reliably, and at scale.


• Design evaluations and experiments that show, with statistical confidence, whether a
  change is a real improvement.


• Build logging, analysis, and debugging tools that help the team understand results and
  failures, and that turn robot sessions into data the team can train on.


• Make what you build reliable, secure, and safe to run, with human approval where it
  matters and responsible use of AI throughout.


• Evaluate emerging AI tools, models, and technologies, and bring in the ones that deliver
  measurable impact.


• Measure the impact of what you build, document it clearly, and make successful tools
  part of how the team operates.