Sr. Simulation & Synthetic Data Engineer - Remote

• Full-time
• Shift: Day
• Max. Salary Region 2: 230700 USD
• Max. Salary Region 1: 271400 USD
• Ways of Working:
  Onsite
  - This job is fully onsite.
• Employee Type:
  Employee
• Min. Salary Region 1: 188600 USD
• Global Job Level (HCM):
  Professional 4 (11)
• Min. Salary Region 2: 160300 USD

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 at Intuitive
. As 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 worldwide.

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.

About the Team

Future Forward Research — Synthetic Data, builds the simulation and data infrastructure that powers Intuitive's autonomous surgical capabilities.

The Role

You’ll build the virtual surgical worlds and the data pipelines that train our perception and policy models. Day to day, that means designing simulation environments, generating large volumes of labeled synthetic data, and working with ML engineers to close the sim-to-real gap for robotic surgery. It's a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of 3D simulation, machine learning, and robotics.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build high-fidelity simulation environments for surgical tasks.
• Generate scalable synthetic datasets including photo realistic imagery, segmentation masks, depth, optical flow, and kinematic state — and own their quality, versioning, and delivery.
• Implement domain randomization and procedural scene generation to maximize sim-to-real transfer.
• Model deformable soft-tissue physics, tool-tissue contact, and instrument kinematics that match Intuitive's platforms.
• Partner with ML engineers to define task curricula, reward functions, and evaluation benchmarks.
• Develop and refine sim-to-real transfer strategies, and validate simulated behaviors against benchtop phantoms and real systems.
• Build reusable tools, APIs, and documentation so the broader team can spin up new tasks without deep simulation expertise.

What You Bring

We care more about real depth in a few of these than shallow coverage of all of them.

• Strong software engineering. You write maintainable, tested code in Python, C++ and/or C#, and you're comfortable in a Linux / Git / Docker / GPU workflow.
• Hands-on simulation or graphics experience. You've built things in a physics simulator, game engine, or rendering/VFX pipeline — robotics simulators, real-time engines, and offline graphics pipelines all count.
• A feel for data and models. You've produced data that trained an ML model (or worked closely alongside that), and you understand how data quality and distribution show up in model behavior.
• Working knowledge of 3D and physics fundamentals — coordinate frames, rendering, rigid-body and contact dynamics — enough to reason about why a simulated scene does or doesn't look and behave correctly.

You've likely spent several years building games, simulation, graphics, robotics, or data systems — but we're far more interested in what you've built than in a specific number on your résumé.
If you don't check every…