Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Virtualization

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. in; Detroit (MI); On-site; USD 190,000 - 322,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead architecture and implementation of mixed‑criticality embedded virtualization for a next‑gen robotic system.

You will own safety strategy, partitioning, and hypervisor tuning, while mentoring engineers and coordinating with stakeholders. You will work across hardware/software stacks, characterize target hardware, and deliver analysis artifacts showing freedom from interference and deterministic timing, within a regulated

Qualifications

• Designing scalable, high‑performance embedded software architectures.
• Proven prototype development from concept to evaluation on target hardware.
• Experience with Linux/QNX environments and related IPC frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Define virtualization safety architecture for a mixed‑criticality system.
• Prototype and evaluate Xen and QNX hypervisors; assess safety and determinism.
• Own hypervisor configuration and integration, addressing platform gaps and vendor support.
• Architect deterministic inter‑VM communication and device virtualization.
• Lead analysis/verification to demonstrate freedom from interference and safe failure behavior.
• Drive safety-focused design mitigations and fault containment strategies.
• Build platform observability exposing health, utilization, latency, and jitter.

Skills

C++

Python

Embedded software

Real-time systems

Linux/QNX

Education

Bachelor’s/Master’s/PhD in EE/CE/CS

Tools

FPGAs

PCIe

Hypervisors (Xen/QNX)

Linux

Job description

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead architecture and implementation of mixed‑criticality embedded virtualization for a next‑gen robotic system.

You will own safety strategy, partitioning, and hypervisor tuning, while mentoring engineers and coordinating with stakeholders. You will work across hardware/software stacks, characterize target hardware, and deliver analysis artifacts showing freedom from interference and deterministic timing, within a regulated