Senior Embedded Research Software Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

As a Senior Embedded Research Software Engineer in the Future Forward organization, you will be at the forefront of innovation, rapid prototyping, and new product development. You will collaborate with talented cross‑functional teams—including engineers, clinicians, and product managers—to advance Intuitive’s robotic surgical platform, driving the product lifecycle from concept to launch.

In this role, you will design, develop, and integrate embedded and platform software across a complex robotic system. This includes interfacing with hardware, firmware, control algorithms, vision pipelines, user interfaces, and test infrastructure such as fault‑injection and diagnostic frameworks. You will contribute to the architecture, implementation, and system‑level integration of advanced functionalities into complete surgical robotic platforms, supporting early‑stage product exploration and development.

Success in this role requires excelling in an agile, small‑team environment—transforming initial concepts into robust prototypes, iterating methodically, and consistently maintaining exceptional product quality with a patient‑first mindset.

• Collaborate cross‑functionally during early‑stage product exploration, prototyping, and development to address clinical, functional, performance, and safety requirements with key stakeholders.
• Translate early requirements into prototype implementations to evaluate, iterate, and advance novel robotic systems.
• Design and develop robust embedded software to enable system infrastructure, including OS drivers, hardware interfaces, real‑time data pipelines, inter‑processor communication, error handling, and user/test applications.
• Act as a subject matter expert in embedded software development by developing prototypes from early requirements, rapidly iterating, and creating a functional product for research studies, employing systems thinking to integrate technology, users, and workflows.
• Refine and iterate designs, balancing technical requirements, feasibility, schedules, and resource constraints.
• Apply strong software engineering practices, including writing maintainable code, modular architecture, testing, and documentation.
• Adapt to project needs by initially exploring a broad range of software technology stacks and delving deeper into specific areas as the project evolves.
• Identify, document, and communicate intellectual property generated during development.