Staff Software Engineer
Staff engineer owning and evolving a Data-as-a-Service platform at Intuitive Surgical: designing scalable streaming and micro-batch pipelines for robot, manufacturing, and clinical data, plus self-service APIs used by 2,000+ engineers. Core tech spans Python/Go/Java, Kafka, Spark, Snowflake, Airflow, Kubernetes, and AWS/GCP.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Sunnyvale, CA, us
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Middle
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Fluent coding with at least two of: Python, Go, Scala, Java, C++
- Proven experience building data pipelines and distributed systems with Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, Airflow
- Deep knowledge of data platform components and design patterns (event-driven pipelines, message queues, container orchestration, stream processing, relational databases, data warehouses, analytics eng
- 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
- Solid quantitative background in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, or 8-10+ years of hands-on experience in a technically demanding role
- Minimum bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information technology, or related field
- Ability to work collaboratively and cross-functionally with end-to-end ownership
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 and successful prior use
- Ph.D. in computer science, mathematics, or a related field
Full description
Primary Function of Position:
The Staff Software Engineer will lead the design and evolution of a modern, scalable Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform that supports Intuitive Digital products and enables more than 2,000 engineers across the organization. This role is responsible for owning and advancing critical components of our real-time and micro-batch data pipelines that power product development, internal tools, and analytics. The engineer will provide architectural direction, influence cross-team data standards, ensure reliability and performance at scale, and drive strategic initiatives that improve developer productivity and data accessibility across the organization.
Major work will focus on enabling high-throughput, low-latency data delivery through streaming pipelines, dynamic transformations, and APIs, driving application development, AI/ML, and actionable insights. You will help define the architecture and engineering practices that support self-service analytics and operational decision-making on scale.
Essential Job Duties
- Build highly scalable distributed systems that leverage event-based and streaming data pipelines to handle ingestion and processing of robot, manufacturing, and clinical data
- Enable users by providing self-service APIs and applications to access and interact with data
- Work closely with core engineering teams to consistently evolve data models based on growing business needs
- Apply and evangelize software development best practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and microservice architectures
- Effectively participate in the team’s planning, code reviews, KPI reviews, and design discussions leading to continuous improvement in these areas.
- Act as a technical leader within the data domain driving best practices, mentoring teammates, and continuously improving how data is produced, shared, and consumed across the organization
Required Skills and Experience
- Fluent coding with at least two of the following: Python, Go, Scala, Java, C++
- Proven experience building data pipelines and working with distributed systems using technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, and Airflow
- Deep technical knowledge & 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)
- Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows, unit testing and integration testing, and deployment patterns.