Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

The AI Engineering group within Intuitive Surgical has an immediate opening in Sunnyvale, CA for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with focus on Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Generative AI and Robotics, contributing to new technology development for next-generation robot-assisted surgery platforms. This role is an exciting opportunity to join a newly formed team and contribute to its growth and it will give you an opportunity to test your knowledge in a challenging problem-solving environment.

The successful candidate must excel in a high-energy, focused, small-team environment, be able to initiate and drive new research directions, and have a commitment to high research quality. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required.

Primary Function of Position:

• Lead the research, design, and implementation of AI algorithms for computer vision (image and video analysis), multimodal data, and action models
• Contribute to surgical AI and robotics pipelines; integrate, test, and evaluate accuracy bottlenecks of vision action (VA), and vision language action (VLA) models
• Lead development of effective techniques and infrastructure, from the initial idea to the running prototype and product.
• Contribute to research projects that develop a variety of algorithms and systems in computer vision, robotics, and multi-modal data fusion.
• Advance the state-of-the-art in the field, including generating patents and publications.
• Develop validation methods, datasets, pipelines, and evaluation metrics to show scalability to large clinical datasets.
• Participate in integration of new ML/CV algorithms into existing and future robotic platforms.
• Collaborate with users and clinical advisors to iterate prototype designs based on feedback and performance.
• Develop new technologies and digital products to improve surgeon and team performance on robotic surgery platforms.
• Support academic collaborations in related fields.

Required Education, Skills & Experience:

• Master's degree with minimum of 6 years industry experience developing computer vision and machine learning applications; or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering or related field and minimum of 3 years of experience
• Strong understanding and experience in building effective learning systems (data collection, training, evaluation, and making iterative improvements).
• Strong publication track record in conferences like CVPR, ICCV, MICCAI, etc.
• Strong hands-on experience with at least one of the mainstream deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python (proficiency), C/C++ (proficiency), shell scripting
• Familiarity with control systems, robotics, kinematics, and dynamics.
• Strong engineering practices, debugging/profiling skills, familiarity with multi-threaded programming.
• Strong hands-on experience with GPU accelerated algorithms and implementations.
• Strong hands-on experience with state-of-the-art AI models, VFMs, or vision action models.
• Excellent communication skills both written and verbal.
• Interested in early phases of product exploration and iteration based on incomplete requirements.
• Solid understanding of computer vision, machine learning, generative models, and deep learning.
• Experience with visualization tools is a plus.
• Self-starter and able to work in a collaborative and results-oriented environment.
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally (5-15%)
• Able to view live and recorded surgical procedures.