Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Platform

Intuitive•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

Every movement a Da Vinci surgical robot makes – every incision, every stitch – runs on software our team builds and owns. We are the BSP and Operating Systems Engineering team at Intuitive and we are responsible for the OS foundation that the da Vinci 5 robotic platform depends on. We are looking for a Senior Embedded Software Engineer who wants to own something consequential: the OS Abstraction Layer (OSAL) framework and resource management architecture across a heterogeneous platform spanning Linux, QNX RTOS, and bare-metal environments on NVIDIA Jetson Orin, TI AM69/TDA4, and AMD MPSoC silicon. This is not a maintenance role. You will design the contracts that govern how processes compete for CPU, memory, and I/O on a safety-critical surgical system – and you will own those decisions end to end. You will have real technical ownership, work alongside engineers who go deep, and ship software that is used in operating rooms around the world.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field with 8+ years of experience; or Master’s degree with 6+ years; or PhD with 3+ years; or equivalent experience.
Deep expertise in Linux kernel and user space – process/thread management, scheduling, memory management (VM, paging, allocation), and IPC.
Strong C/C++ with real system-level programming experience, not just application-layer C++.
Hands-on debugging fluency with tools such as GDB, strace, valgrind, ftrace, perf or equivalent profilers.
Experience with at least one RTOS or bare-metal environment (QNX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, or similar).
Demonstrated ability to architecture and own a software framework or abstraction layer used by other engineers.
Comfortable influencing system architecture decisions across teams through design reviews and V&V activities.
Strong written and verbal communication – you can explain a kernel scheduling decision and a resource allocation contract to a non-expert.

Nice To Haves

NVIDIA Jetson platform experience (TX2, Xavier, Orin NX/AGX, Thor) as we use this hardware regularly.
QNX RTOS depth – microkernel architecture, pulse/message-based IPC, resource managers.
Secure boot, TPM integration, or embedded security architecture experience.
Hypervisor or virtualization experience in embedded contexts (Xen, KVM, QNX Hypervisor).
Yocto / OpenEmbedded experience – BSP maintenance, layer design, recipe authorship.
Python and bash scripting for test automation and boot sequence design.
Demonstrated experience in and comfort with all phases of the product development lifecycle, including design, implementation, debugging, verification, validation, and transfer to manufacturing.
Experience designing software products in an FDA or other regulated industry or for mission-critical applications; comfortable with concepts of design input, design output, traceability, risk analysis, and mitigations.

Responsibilities

Technical ownership of the OSAL framework: architect, implement, and maintain a consistent API across Linux, QNX, and bare-metal environments.
Design and implement contract-based resource allocation frameworks governing memory budgets, CPU scheduling guarantees, I/O bandwidth, and device access contracts for system processes and applications.
Build monitoring and enforcement infrastructure that detects and responds to resource violations in real time on a safety-critical platform.
Optimize system performance through deliberate scheduling strategies and resource allocation across heterogeneous mutli-processor SoC/FPGA environments.
Debug complex multi-threaded and multi-process system failures – including the hardest cross-layer problems that require deep OS internals knowledge to resolve.
Work directly with Linux kernel interfaces, QNX microkernel APIs, and bare-metal system programming to deliver robust, production-quality C/C++ software.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers on OS internals, system architecture, and systematic debugging practice.