Senior Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer at Intuitive Surgical building a Data-as-a-Service platform serving 2,000+ engineers — designing real-time and micro-batch streaming pipelines and self-service APIs for robot, manufacturing, and clinical data using Kafka, Spark, Flink, Snowflake, Airflow, Kubernetes, and AWS/GCP.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Santa Clara, CA, us
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Middle
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Fluent coding in at least two major programming languages
- Hands-on experience building data pipelines and distributed systems (e.g. Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, Airflow)
- Technical knowledge of Data Platform design patterns: event-driven pipelines (AWS Lambda), message queues (Kafka), Kubernetes, stream processing (Flink/Spark), Postgres, Snowflake, DBT, Airflow, Elast
- Solid understanding of CI/CD workflows, unit and integration testing, and deployment patterns
- Experience with AWS and/or GCP
- Experience with SQL and relational databases
- Collaborative, cross-functional mindset with ownership of deliverables
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, IT, or related field with typically 5+ years of relevant experience
Nice to have
- Experience on a Platform team
- Experience with GitLab CI/CD or other CI tooling
- Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Packer and general IaC best practices
- Familiarity with CNCF projects
Full description
Primary Function of Position:
The Senior Software Engineer will design, build, and evolve key components of a modern, scalable Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform that supports Intuitive Digital products and serves more than 2,000 engineers across the organization. This role is responsible for independently delivering significant features and services within our real-time and micro-batch data pipelines that power product development, internal tools, and analytics. The engineer will make sound design decisions within their area, collaborate effectively across functions, and contribute to the reliability, performance, and usability of the platform at scale.
Major work will focus on developing high-throughput, low-latency data delivery through streaming pipelines, dynamic transformations, and APIs that enable application development, AI/ML, and actionable insights. You will help implement the architecture and engineering practices that support self-service analytics and operational decision-making.
Essential Job Duties
- Design and build scalable distributed systems that leverage event-based and streaming data pipelines to handle ingestion and processing of robot, manufacturing, and clinical data
- Develop self-service APIs and applications that enable users to access and interact with data
- Partner with core engineering teams to evolve data models in response to changing business needs
- Apply software development best practices — CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and microservice architectures — in your day-to-day work
- Actively participate in team planning, code reviews, KPI reviews, and design discussions, offering constructive input and driving decisions to closure within your area
- Serve as a mentor to junior engineers and new team members, sharing knowledge and helping accelerate their ramp-up and growth
- May lead moderately complex projects within the data domain, coordinating with cross-functional partners to deliver successful outcomes
Required Skills and Experience
- Fluent coding in at least two major programming languages
- Hands-on experience building data pipelines and working with distributed systems using technologies such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, and Airflow
- Working technical knowledge and experience with Data Platform components / design patterns:Event-Driven Pipelines (e.g. AWS Lambda)Message Queues (e.g. Kafka)Container Orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)Stream Processing (e.g. Flink, Spark)Relational Databases (e.g. Postgres)Data Warehouses (e.g. Snowflake)Analytics Engineering (e.g. DBT)Workflow Orchestration (e.g. Airflow)Search Engines (e.g. Elasticsearch)