Staff Data Scientist: Robotics Motion AI & Simulation

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive Surgical in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Data Scientist – Simulation Motion AI to lead scalable data systems for training, evaluating, and improving robotic policies in motion AI products. You will design synthetic data pipelines, build advanced simulation environments, and collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams to enable safe, robust robot learning and deployment at scale.

You will drive experimentation, ensure data provenance, and optimize GPU-backed workflows while navigating

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree in CS, robotics, ML, or related field.
• 9+ years of industry experience in simulation and ML for robotics, or 4+ years with a PhD.
• Hands-on experience with robotics simulation platforms: NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or equivalent.
• Experience creating custom simulation environments, robot assets, sensors, or procedural scene-generation systems.
• Proficiency with Python and PyTorch.
• Experience with robot kinematics, dynamics, trajectories, and closed-loop control.
• Ability to diagnose model failures using quantitative analysis.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Robotics

Data science

Machine learning

Education

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

Tools

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

MuJoCo

Isaac Lab

TensorFlow

Job description

Intuitive Surgical in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Data Scientist – Simulation Motion AI to lead scalable data systems for training, evaluating, and improving robotic policies in motion AI products. You will design synthetic data pipelines, build advanced simulation environments, and collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams to enable safe, robust robot learning and deployment at scale.

You will drive experimentation, ensure data provenance, and optimize GPU-backed workflows while navigating