Staff Electrical Engineer

Intuitive; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive Surgical seeks a Staff Electrical Engineer to join the Advanced Product Development team in Sunnyvale, CA. You will define embedded architecture, lead motor control design, and implement high-speed compute platform PCAs for robotic surgery systems.

You will collaborate across FPGA, software, and mechanical teams to verify, validate, and release features while driving robust design practices and vendor evaluations.

Qualifications

Responsibilities

• Design, bring-up, and integration of custom PCAs.
• Architect communication, processing, and distribution of electronic subsystems.
• Collaborate on system design with FPGA, mechanical, software, and controls teams.
• Identify and implement actuation components for robotic systems.
• Implement PCB designs balancing performance, cost, and manufacturability.
• Perform board-level bring-up and troubleshooting.
• Execute formal risk analysis and mitigation plans.
• Evaluate vendors and translate technologies into robust building blocks.
• Write design documentation and verification plans.
• Develop and run V&V protocols and scripts.
• Follow design controls from spec to manufacturing.

Skills

Embedded systems

PCB design

Motor control

System architecture

VHDL/FPGA

Tools

Altium

SPICE

LabVIEW

Job description

Job Description

Primary Function of Position:

We are seeking a Staff Electrical Engineer to join the Advanced Product Development (APD) research and development team at Intuitive Surgical. In this role you will be responsible for both embedded architecture definition, motor control systems and the design and implementation of high-speed compute platform PCAs. As a Staff Electrical Engineer, you will work with a small multidisciplinary start-up-like team chartered with inventing the future of computer-augmented robotic surgery. You will be involved in delivering features by integrating complex functionality into complete surgical robot solutions, and seeing these through verification, validation and product release.

The successful candidate must excel in a high-energy focused small-team environment, be able to drive to solutions from rough requirements, and have a commitment to high product quality. Quick learning and a desire to deeply understand requirements, develop high-fidelity prototypes, and rapidly iterate are essential. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required, as is the desire to make work fun, collaborative, and interesting. Supporting you will be a development and management team that knows and cares about what you are doing and is a partner in your continued career development and success.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Design, bring-up, and integration of custom printed circuit assemblies (PCAs).


• Architect communication, processing, and distribution of electronic subsystems across the product. Challenge the status quo architecture to propose alternate, efficient and latest tech stacks,


• Collaborate on system design and architecture with other Advanced Development engineering team members, including FPGA logic design, mechanical, software and controls.


• Identify and implement key components in actuation of robotic systems (e.g. position and motion sensing, vision, embedded display and UI, and the driving of brushed and brushless DC motors).


• Implement PCB designs that balance performance, cost, and manufacturability.


• Perform board level bring-up and troubleshooting.


• Perform formal risk analysis and develop mitigations.


• Discover and develop new vendors and their technologies – develop the design and performance understanding to transform these into robust building blocks for future platforms.


• Write detailed design documentation, including specifications and verification plans per Intuitive’s guidelines.


• Write V&V (Verification and Validation) protocols and associated scripts, as well as protocol execution.


• Follow rigorous design control methodology from design specification through design transfer to manufacturing.