Platform Software Engineer

Job Description

Primary Function of Position:

As a Staff Platform Software Engineer, you will act as a technical lead in many aspects of the software development for a novel surgical robotic platform. This is an exciting opportunity to lead a technical team focused on developing new solutions to address significant unmet patient needs.

In this position, you will drive the software architecture definition and the implementation for a new surgical robotic system in support of new or emerging applications, creating cross‑functional alignment while delivering high value technical solutions.

Critical to the success of this role is experience in leading small technical teams to successfully drive product specification and early engineering development for new technology‑based instruments and platforms, from inception to early feasibility studies and regulatory clearances.

The successful candidate must excel in a high‑energy small, focused team environment, be able to drive to solutions from rough requirements and methodical prototype iterations, and have a commitment to high product quality that places patients first.

Quick learning and a desire to understand requirements from a user’s and engineering’s perspective are essential to become a valuable system developer. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required, as is the ability to make work fun and interesting. Supporting you will be a development and management team that knows and cares about what you are doing and wants you to succeed.

Essential

Job Duties:

• Gather high‑level cross‑functional requirements, ranging from customer‑facing requirements to clinical and safety requirements, and cybersecurity requirements.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional stakeholders on the definition of development plans and timelines, that combine technical needs with schedule and resource need.
• Identify interfaces and communication requirements between hardware and software components, architect modular and testable software that supports the system high‑level behaviors.
• Support prototyping and development activities of novel surgical robotic platforms, by leveraging and adapting the existing infrastructure that is shared across all Intuitive robotic systems; learn from each iteration, refine and extend code quickly and methodically.
• Lead formal risk analysis; identify additional hardware requirements and develop software mitigations.
• Act as software lead in the high‑level specification, bring‑up and integration of new custom PCAs and FPGA IP.
• Perform detailed design, development, documentation and support verification activities of embedded software and supervisory state machines, in compliance with regulatory requirements and Intuitive's internal guidelines.
• Contribute broadly to multiple areas of software development for our distributed multi‑processor systems, including but not limited to video and servo hardware control and monitoring, inter‑processor communication subsystem development, system diagnostic and service application development, user interface development.
• Apply high level and specialized industry expertise that results in new innovations and problem‑solving approaches that can be leveraged across multiple products.
• Represent your project ably in interactions externally with key customer collaborators and internally within the company.

Required Education and Training

• Bachelor’s degree or above in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering, or similar technical field.
• A minimum of 12 years of experience in developing and supporting embedded systems (or 8 years with a Master’s degree, or 5 years with a PhD degree).

Required Skills and Experience

• Fluent in designing and developing mission‑critical cross‑platform code in C++ or C, with focus on embedded and real time systems (e.g. QNX).
• Fluent with embedded compute architectures, and their development and testing methodologies, including hardware debugging.
• Fluent with communication protocols such as TCP/IP, CAN, serialization protocols.
• Fluent with memory management, concurrency, synchronous and asynchronous event handling.
• Working knowledge of Python or other…