AI​/ML Architect, Embodied AI

• Ways of Working:
  Onsite - This job is fully onsite.
• Employee Type:
  Employee
• Min. Salary Region 1: 229600 USD
• Global Job Level (HCM):
  Professional 5 (13)
• Min. Salary Region 2: 195200 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.

The Future Forward organization is Intuitive’s advanced concepts group. We explore emerging technologies, prototype next-generation solutions, and build software experiences that shape the future of robotic-assisted surgery.

If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare
, you’ll find your purpose here.

Primary Function of Position

We are building advanced augmented dexterity capabilities for next-generation robotic platforms. As a Staff AI/ML Architect, you will own the end-to-end architecture of our applied‑AI system: a hierarchical, multimodal stack in which a high‑level model interprets sensory observations and produces structured intent, and a low‑level policy turns that intent into precise, safe, real‑time control. You will set the technical direction the rest of the AI/ML team builds against, define the interfaces between perception, reasoning, and control, and make the architecture decisions that let us move safely from offline research to real‑time deployment.

Working within Intuitive's Future Forward research organization, you will identify, build and finetune AI/ML models and algorithms and define the architecture that enables us to deliver safe and performant embodied AI systems. This role calls for someone who is equally comfortable getting hands‑on with models and data and designing systems that scale.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end architecture for a hierarchical perception, reasoning, and control AI system.
• Specify the contracts between layers: model outputs, policy interfaces, timing budgets, and safety hooks, and keep them stable as components are swapped and upgraded.
• Make the build and modular‑vs‑monolithic calls, evaluate in‑house approaches against the state of the art and set the target architecture.
• Establish the path from offline evaluation on recorded data to real‑time integration, including the continuous‑improvement (human‑in‑the‑loop) data loop.
• Partner across research, engineering, data, and product teams, mentor senior scientists/engineers and raise the engineering bar across the effort.
• Partner with AI/ML researchers, robotics, data engineers, and other stakeholders to deliver a modular architecture that enables rapid prototyping and learning while working toward a product solution.

Minimum Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field with 10+ years building AI/ML models and algorithms for autonomous‑systems software, with demonstrated ownership of an end-to-end AI/ML system architecture taken to production or to a rigorous prototype.
• Deep experience with hierarchical, modular AI/ML or robot‑learning stacks, including high‑level reasoning paired with low‑level control policies.
• Strong grasp of real‑time and safety‑critical ML: latency budgets, failure modes, fallback/abort behavior, and interface/contract design across components.
• Hands‑on expertise with modern deep learning and multimodal, vision‑language, LLM‑based architectures, including vision foundation models (VFM), vision‑action (VA), and vision‑language‑action (VLA) models.
• F…