Staff Software Engineer

Intuitive•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

The Staff Software Engineer will lead the design and evolution of a modern, scalable Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform supporting Intuitive Digital products and more than 2,000 engineers. The role owns and advances critical components of real-time and micro-batch data pipelines used for product development, internal tools, and analytics. It provides architectural direction, influences data standards across teams, ensures reliability and performance at scale, and drives initiatives to improve developer productivity and data accessibility. The work emphasizes high-throughput, low-latency data delivery through streaming pipelines, dynamic transformations, and APIs to enable application development, AI/ML, actionable insights, self-service analytics, and operational decision-making.

Requirements

Fluent coding proficiency in at least two of Python, Go, Scala, Java, or C++.
Proven experience building data pipelines and working with distributed systems using technologies such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, and Airflow.
Deep technical knowledge and experience with data platform components and design patterns, including event-driven pipelines, message queues, container orchestration, stream processing, relational databases, data warehouses, analytics engineering, workflow orchestration, and search engines.
Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows, unit and integration testing, and deployment patterns.
Experience with AWS and/or GCP.
Experience with SQL and relational databases.
Ability and enthusiasm to collaborate cross-functionally and take end-to-end ownership to deliver customer results.
Solid quantitative background in computer science, engineering, physics, or mathematics, or 8–10+ years of hands-on experience in a technically demanding role.
At least a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Experience on a platform team.
Experience with GitLab CI/CD or other CI tooling.
Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Packer, and general infrastructure-as-code best practices.
Familiarity with CNCF projects and successful prior use of them.
Ph.D. in computer science, mathematics, or a related field.

Responsibilities

Build highly scalable distributed systems using event-based and streaming data pipelines to ingest and process robot, manufacturing, and clinical data.
Enable users to access and interact with data through self-service APIs and applications.
Work with core engineering teams to evolve data models in response to changing business needs.
Apply and promote software development best practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and microservice architectures.
Participate in team planning, code reviews, KPI reviews, and design discussions to drive continuous improvement.
Act as a technical leader in the data domain, drive best practices, mentor teammates, and improve how data is produced, shared, and consumed across the organization.