Staff Platform Engineer

At Intuitive, we are united behind our mission: we believe that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. Through ingenuity and intelligent technology, we expand the potential of physicians to heal without constraints.

As a pioneer and market leader in robotic-assisted surgery, we strive to foster an inclusive and diverse team, committed to making a difference. For more than 25 years, we have worked with hospitals and care teams around the world to help solve some of healthcare's hardest challenges and advance what is possible.

Intuitive has been built by the efforts of great people from diverse backgrounds. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere. We strive to foster an inclusive culture built around diversity of thought and mutual respect. We lead with inclusion and empower our team members to do their best work as their most authentic selves.

Passionate people who want to make a difference drive our culture. Our team members are grounded in integrity, have a strong capacity to learn, the energy to get things done, and bring diverse, real world experiences to help us think in new ways. We actively invest in our team members to support their long-term growth so they can continue to advance our mission and achieve their highest potential.

Join a team committed to taking big leaps forward for a global community of healthcare professionals and their patients. Together, let's advance the world of minimally invasive care.

Primary Function:

We are seeking an experienced Staff Platform Engineer with 5-8+ years of proven experience in regulated environments. The ideal candidate will support small to mid-sized development teams, focusing on infrastructure automation, cloud integration, and Infrastructure as Code methodologies.

Key Responsibilities:

- Technical design and architecture of large-scale platform services and infrastructure
- Develop high-quality internal platform services, APIs, and tools that serve hundreds of developers
- Build self-service platforms and automation frameworks using Python, Go, or similar languages
- Design and implement multi-cloud infrastructure patterns using Terraform and IaC best practices
- Write CLIs, SDKs, libraries, and Kubernetes operators for internal platform consumption
- Define and drive platform engineering standards, best practices, and technical roadmap
- Create web applications and dashboards for platform observability and developer experience
- Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve system reliability, performance, and scalability
- Write automated tests (unit, integration, e2e) and establish testing frameworks
- Drive technical decisions on infrastructure, tooling, and technology stack
- Deploy and manage workflow orchestration platforms (Apache Airflow) at scale
- Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and elevate team technical capabilities
- Collaborate with product and engineering leadership on strategic platform initiatives
- On-call for critical platform services with focus on building resilient systems

Required:

- 8+ years of software engineering or platform engineering experience
- Expert programming skills in Python, Go, or similar languages
- Strong experience building scalable APIs (REST, gRPC), microservices, and distributed systems
- Deep understanding of system design, data structures, algorithms, and design patterns
- Proven track record of architecting and delivering large-scale platform solutions
- Expert-level experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
- Deep Kubernetes expertise including operators, controllers, and cluster management
- Experience writing comprehensive automated tests and establishing testing strategies
- Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and release engineering
- Database design, optimization, and scaling (SQL and NoSQL)
- Linux/Unix systems programming, networking, and performance tuning
- Strong technical leadership and mentorship abilities
- Excellent communication skills for cross-functional collaboration

Open Source Tools Experience:
- Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize
- Infrastructure**: Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi
- CI/CD: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger
- Workflow Orchestration: Apache Airflow, Temporal, Prefect
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB
- Message Queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS
- Service Mesh: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy

Preferred:
- Active open source contributor or project maintainer with significant community impact
- Experience with web frameworks (Flask, FastAPI, Django, Gin, Echo) for building internal tools
- Frontend development skills (React, Vue.js) for creating developer portals
- Kubernetes operator development (kubebuilder, operator-sdk)
- Multi-cloud architecture and migration experience
- Service mesh implementation and operations (Istio, Linkerd)
- Event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar)
- Security engineering, IAM, secrets management, and compliance
- SRE practices, incident management, and reliability engineering at scale
- Performance engineering and cost optimization initiatives
- Experience presenting at conferences or tech talks

Due to the nature of our business and the role, please note that Intuitive and/or your customer(s) may require that you show current proof of vaccination against certain diseases including COVID-19.  Details can vary by role.

Intuitive is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees, and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, without regard to race, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, religion, protected veteran or disability status, genetic information or any other status protected under federal, state, or local applicable laws.

Mandatory Notices

U.S. Export Controls Disclaimer:  In accordance with the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (15 CFR §743.13(b)), some roles at Intuitive Surgical may be subject to U.S. export controls for prospective employees
who are nationals from countries currently on embargo or sanctions status.

Certain information you provide as part of the application will be used for purposes of determining whether Intuitive Surgical will need to (i) obtain an export license from the U.S. Government on your behalf (note: the government’s licensing process can take 3 to 6+ months) or (ii) implement a Technology Control Plan (“TCP”) (note: typically adds 2 weeks to the hiring process).  

For any Intuitive role subject to export controls, final offers are contingent upon obtaining an approved export license and/or an executed TCP prior to the prospective employee’s
start date, which may or may not be flexible, and within a timeframe that does not unreasonably impede the hiring need. If applicable, candidates will be notified and instructed on any requirements for these purposes. 

We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with fair chance laws.

Preference will be given to qualified candidates who do not reside, or plan to reside, in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, or Tennessee.

We provide market-competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base pay, incentives, benefits, and equity. It would not be typical for someone to be hired at the top end of range for the role, as actual pay will be determined based on several factors, including experience, skills, and qualifications. The target compensation ranges are listed.