Clinical Development Engineer

Company Description

It started with a simple idea: what if surgery could be less invasive and recovery less painful? Nearly 30 years later, that question still fuels everything we do  a global leader in robotic‑assisted surgery and minimally invasive care, our technologies—like the da Vinci surgical system and Ion—have transformed how care is delivered for millions of patients. We’re a team of engineers, clinicians, and innovators united by one purpose: to make surgery smarter, safer, and more human.

Every day, our work helps care teams perform with greater precision and patients recover faster, improving outcomes around the world. The problems we solve demand creativity, rigor, and collaboration. The work is challenging, but deeply meaningful—because every improvement we make has the potential to change a life. If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare, you’ll find your purpose here.

This Staff Clinical Development Engineer (CDE) position reports to the Clinical Development Engineering Director on the Ion Endoluminal platform. In this position, a Staff CDE utilizes their in‑depth clinical, technical and design control knowledge to collaborate with physicians and design engineering to discover, define, develop, and validate new product solutions for flexible robotic catheter platforms. Their primary focus is to understand user needs, establish clinical and engineering requirements, consider clinical risks and identify solutions to guide product development.

They also help explore robotic clinical applications for Intuitive products, as well as future opportunities to optimize product integration into the clinical setting.

• Clinical and Technical Expertise
  • Apply in‑depth knowledge of the clinical procedure and of medical technology in order to become an expert within the company on Intuitive’s products and clinical applications
  • Collaborate with physicians and key clinical users to understand the clinical need
  • Provide a clinical voice for design and evaluation of Intuitive’s products
  • Assess potential clinical risks and mitigations to drive appropriate product design
  • In‑depth technical understanding of the Intuitive products and adjunct medical device technology that includes mechanical, software, algorithms, electronics aspects of the device
• Product Leadership
  • Drive product discovery in collaboration with product management and product design teams by being the internal champion of clinical need
  • Lead early design investigation teams that are lean and efficient for product enhancements & new product ideas
  • Establish milestones and success criteria for early investigations
  • Drive stakeholder alignment frequently and solicit appropriate user feedback
  • Drive decision making and expedite key issues quickly
  • Keep the organization’s vision and values at the forefront of decision making and action
  • Create best‑practice guidelines, white papers and mentor junior members of the team through product discovery and development
• Design Control Expertise
  • Drive early design decisions with a sound understanding of design control, clinical risks and evaluation strategy
  • Drive design validation testing strategy for new products and align with key regulatory and engineering stakeholders
  • Support product launches and collect early field feedback in collaboration with product management
  • Collaborate closely with other organizations within the company, including design, marketing, regulatory, human factors, training, product management, and sales throughout product development and testing

• Masters in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering or similar
• Minimum of 15 years of experience in medical device industry required
• Minimum of 10 years of clinical development and design control experience
• Ability to understand complex robotic products
• Experience collaborating with physicians and collecting feedback on clinical use of the product
• Experience working in cross‑functional teams and proven ability to cultivate collaboration across multiple disciplines (marketing, regulatory, quality, product design,…