Staff AI/ML Architect, Embodied AI

Intuitive Surgical
Sunnyvale, CA
Job Description
Role Overview

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.

What You Will Do

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.

Why It Might Be a Fit

This role calls for someone who is equally comfortable getting hands-on with models and data and designing systems that scale. You will partner across research, engineering, data, and product teams, mentor senior scientists/engineers and raise the engineering bar across the effort.

Requirements

  • MS or PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field
  • 10+ years building AI/ML models and algorithms for autonomous-systems software
  • Deep experience with hierarchical, modular AI/ML or robot-learning stacks
  • Strong grasp of real-time and safety-critical ML
  • Hands-on expertise with modern deep learning and multimodal, vision-language, LLM-based architectures
  • Fluency in one of PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, and in Python and C++
  • Working knowledge of world-model and self-supervised predictive architectures
  • Solid foundations in linear algebra, probability, and optimization

Benefits

  • Competitive salary
  • Annual bonus
  • Equity
  • Comprehensive benefits
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