Staff Mechanical Design Engineer

It started with a simple idea: what if surgery could be less invasive and recovery less painful? Nearly 30 years later, that question still fuels everything we do at Intuitive. As a global leader in robotic-assisted surgery and minimally invasive care, our technologies—like the da Vinci surgical system and Ion—have transformed how care is delivered for millions of patients worldwide.We’re a team of engineers, clinicians, and innovators united by one purpose: to make surgery smarter, safer, and more human. Every day, our work helps care teams perform with greater precision and patients recover faster, improving outcomes around the world.The problems we solve demand creativity, rigor, and collaboration. The work is challenging, but deeply meaningful—because every improvement we make has the potential to change a life.If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare, you’ll find your purpose here. Primary Function of PositionIntuitive Surgical designs and manufactures highly complex mechanical systems (including instruments and accessories) for use in surgery. The successful Staff Mechanical Design Engineer will lead the design, sourcing, development, and integration of novel mechanical and mechatronic concepts for instrument and accessory related products. The candidate must be able to identify and evaluate new candidate technologies, establish design requirements and create novel designs to meet customer needs, work with suppliers and other outside companies to realize viable technical solutions, and refine designs for transfer to the new product development organization. He or she must excel in a high-energy team environment and be capable of creative problem solving when faced with time pressures and incomplete information typical of early-stage product development. The successful candidate must have outstanding technical depth in relevant areas and be as comfortable collaborating and leading across organizational boundaries as they working independently.Essential Job DutiesWork with subject matter experts to understand the clinical, usability, and other needs of users of da Vinci systems as they relate to surgical instruments and accessories.Develop technical requirements for designs based on an understanding of user needs.Perform conceptual design, detailed design, analytical modeling, prototyping, and troubleshooting of novel instruments and accessories for the da Vinci robotic surgical system.Create new product architectures to solve complex and highly constrained design problems.Develop and perform early design verification and validation testing, with assistance from other functions as needed.Assist with clinical evaluation of prototypes by supporting ex-vivo and in-vivo laboratory testing.Assist with mechanical engineering problem-solving in any part of the organization as needed to solve challenges on urgent or critical programs.Identify, test, and report on new materials, man...