Senior Manager Mechanical Design Engineering, GI Robot

Intuitive•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

The Senior Manager Mechanical Design Engineering will lead the GI Robot Platform mechanical engineering team in developing, documenting, verifying, and launching new product designs. The role guides the team in identifying and evaluating product opportunities that address new and unmet customer needs, and ensures designs deliver value to patients, physicians, and hospitals. The manager provides functional leadership for mechanical engineers and other technical personnel, including selecting, developing, evaluating, coaching, and mentoring team members. The role also sets group objectives, assigns work, establishes priorities and metrics, and tracks progress against product development goals. The successful candidate brings strong mechanical design expertise and can work independently while collaborating and influencing across organizational boundaries. This position provides engineering resources and R&D leadership across product development and lifecycle management, partnering with groups such as Product Management, Clinical Research, Clinical and Medical Affairs, Process Development, Testing, Supplier Engineering, Quality, Regulatory Affairs, and Marketing. The manager supports design transfer and ensures compliance with design-history-file practices and product development procedures.

Requirements

At least 10 years of experience in mechanical product design.
At least 5 years of direct people-management experience.
At least 5 years of experience taking products from concept to production.
Bachelor’s degree or higher in Mechanical Engineering or a related engineering field.
Strong people-management ability, including staffing, productivity, and career development of team members.
Ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams developing complex surgical products.
Excellent verbal communication and presentation skills, including presenting team work to executive management.
Exceptional mechanical aptitude and visual-thinking skills.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including areas such as finite element analysis, statistics, and experimental design.
Strong project management, planning, and change-management skills.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering or a related engineering field.
Medical product experience.
Experience across the product development lifecycle, including design, implementation, debugging, verification, qualification, and transfer.
Experience designing products in a highly regulated environment.
Proficiency using CAD to design and document mechanical designs; SolidWorks is preferred.
Knowledge of manufacturing techniques, including rapid fabrication of proof-of-concept and functional prototypes.
Experience with component selection criteria and designing for reliability and manufacturability.
Hands-on engineering management experience and ability to work well in a team environment.
Ability to lead and inspire trust and commitment through integrity, passion, and professional excellence.

Responsibilities

Provide technical vision for project teams and foster creativity, appropriate risk-taking, and effective execution.
Develop an understanding of external customer needs and requirements to guide valuable product designs.
Establish group objectives and individual work goals aligned with product development goals.
Assign tasks, set priorities, establish metrics, and track progress.
Assess employee performance and provide coaching to improve it.
Manage, coach, and mentor engineers, technicians, and drafters.
Ensure design engineers follow appropriate FDA design history file guidelines and conduct design reviews in accordance with product development procedures.
Provide engineering resources to Process Development, Manufacturing, Supplier Engineering, Test Engineering, and Quality to facilitate design transfer.
Lead planning, staffing, budgeting, and project or program cost tracking.
Build and maintain cross-functional partnerships to ensure alignment throughout product development and lifecycle management.
Serve as the primary R&D liaison to senior leadership and cross-functional meetings, presenting technical updates, design rationale, and risk mitigation strategies.