Staff Data Scientist – Robotic Motion AI Simulation

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. in; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 183,000 - 309,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive Surgical is seeking a Staff Data Scientist to lead scalable simulation-data systems for training and evaluating robotic policies in motion AI. You will collaborate with foundation and policy teams, test, regulatory, product, and clinical teams to generate data and test algorithms in simulation at scale.

You will build synthetic data pipelines, design curricula for multi-stage robotic tasks, and ensure reproducibility and provenance of datasets for safety-critical AI systems.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science, robotics, machine learning, data science, or related field.
• 9+ years of industry experience (or 4+ with PhD) in simulation, ML, robotics, CV, or autonomous systems.
• Hands-on experience with major robotics simulation platforms (Isaac Sim/Lab, MuJoCo).
• Experience creating custom simulation environments, task definitions, sensors, reward functions, or procedural scene generation.
• Experience with Python and PyTorch.
• Experience with robot kinematics, dynamics, calibration, trajectories, and closed-loop control.
• Ability to diagnose model failures with quantitative analysis and test on physical systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable pipelines for generating synthetic robotic interaction data using simulators.
• Build scalable simulation environments and data-generation curricula for progressive tasks.
• Define data-generation strategies covering calibration, camera, geometry, contacts, and recovery conditions.
• Design systems to replay, perturb, relabel, and extend real-world trajectories in simulation.
• Establish provenance, metadata, versioning, and reproducibility standards for simulated datasets.

Skills

Python

Machine learning

Robotics

Data science

Experiment design

Education

PhD or Master's degree in CS/robotics/ML

Tools

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

NVIDIA Isaac Lab

MuJoCo

PyTorch

Job description

Intuitive Surgical is seeking a Staff Data Scientist to lead scalable simulation-data systems for training and evaluating robotic policies in motion AI. You will collaborate with foundation and policy teams, test, regulatory, product, and clinical teams to generate data and test algorithms in simulation at scale.

You will build synthetic data pipelines, design curricula for multi-stage robotic tasks, and ensure reproducibility and provenance of datasets for safety-critical AI systems.