Sr. AI & Automation Engineer, Robotics
About The Position
The Senior AI & Automation Engineer will build AI tools, automation systems, integrations, and evaluation capabilities that help researchers and engineers train, test, and evaluate models faster and make better decisions. The role applies existing AI technologies and develops new solutions, including agent-driven workflows, AI tooling, APIs, services, and automation frameworks that support engineering and research activities. The engineer will automate the work of training and testing physical AI systems, rather than designing the models themselves, and will collaborate closely with machine-learning researchers, simulation engineers, and robotics engineers in Intuitive's Future Forward advanced concepts organization.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience building testing, automation, or evaluation systems that ran on real robot hardware or other physical systems through software interfaces, not only in cloud environments or simulation.
- Experience building and putting into daily use LLM-agent workflows, AI tool integrations, copilots, or automation pipelines for engineering work, and measuring their effectiveness.
- Ability to explain an AI or automation system built, including what it did, where it failed, and what was changed.
- Knowledge of experimental design and statistics sufficient to determine whether an improvement is real.
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience.
- Production-quality Python programming skills.
- Ability to read C++.
- Comfort with Linux, CI/CD, Docker, containerized services, APIs, and distributed systems.
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Ability to work across disciplines in a fast-moving research environment and explain trade-offs clearly to researchers and engineers.
Nice To Haves
- Advanced degree (MS or PhD).
- Experience with robotics simulation, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Lab or MuJoCo.
- Experience evaluating AI/ML, robotics, or robot-learning systems.
- Experience in surgical or medical robotics, including da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) systems.
- Experience with ROS 2 or other robot middleware.
- Experience with agent frameworks, tool integrations, or MCP servers adopted by engineering teams.
- Experience building AI assistants, copilots, or productivity tools for engineers or researchers.
- Experience applying AI to scientific, engineering, or research workflows.
Responsibilities
- Build and integrate AI tools, APIs, and agent workflows to automate engineering and research work across the team.
- Automate training and fine-tuning workflows, including experiment setup, launching, tracking, and comparing runs, so researchers can reproduce results without hand-built scripts.
- Build automation and integration workflows that enable researchers and engineers to evaluate ideas in simulation and on real robots quickly, reliably, and at scale.
- Design evaluations and experiments that establish with statistical confidence whether a change is an improvement.
- Build logging, analysis, and debugging tools to help the team understand results and failures and turn robot sessions into training data.
- Make tools reliable, secure, and safe to run, incorporating human approval where appropriate and responsible AI use.
- Evaluate emerging AI tools, models, and technologies and adopt those that deliver measurable impact.
- Measure and document the impact of tools, and incorporate successful tools into team operations.
Benefits
- Market-competitive compensation package including base pay, incentives, benefits, and equity.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
