Senior Software Manager - Embedded Real-Time Software

Primary Function of Position

The Servo Software team is responsible for the real-time software infrastructure that supports critical performance, safety, and user-facing features of the da Vinci™ Surgical System, Intuitive’s flagship product. Our real-time, embedded software enables motion control, audio, supervisory mode control, and data generation and streaming. Additionally, our team provides platform support for the da Vinci™ Simulator product line. Because our workstreams depend upon and enable the work of several other teams, we occupy an exciting intersection of real-time architecture, feature development, and demonstration of product safety and reliability.

The successful candidate must excel in a high-energy, focused, and cross-functional environment. They must be effective in leading a team to drive to solutions from rough requirements and maintain a commitment to high product quality. They must demonstrate ownership of their areas of responsibility and of the overall product. A strong sense of shared responsibility and shared reward is required.

Essential Job Duties

• Provide technical vision and leadership for the department and the organization. Be a willing resource for consultation on challenging problems.
• Be a resource to management for strategic technical direction and decision-making.
• Span departments and business units to drive critical technical initiatives. Take technical ownership of critical areas when gaps exist. Clearly communicate to management where you see organization challenges or misalignment.
• Support the design and development of product-focused, robust, efficient, and elegant C++ software in a heterogeneous, multi-processor multi-core SoC/FPGA/real-time-embedded environment.
• Identify design and architecture improvement opportunities, such as reduced latency and increased reliability/determinism, and influence the system architecture (software, firmware, and hardware) to realize such improvements.
• Prove out new architectural enhancements to the software infrastructure and development processes that elevate the broader organization beyond your own team.
• Coordinate and deliver on simultaneous team efforts, including: performing safety/risk analysis, translating risk mitigations to system software requirements, ensuring software implementation satisfies requirements, gathering and analyzing data to quantify system performance and reliability, preparing for and conducting design reviews, and completing verification testing and reporting.
• Interface and collaborate effectively and respectfully with other teams, including: Platform Software, Electrical Engineering and FPGA Design, Mechanical Engineering, System Analysis, System Test, User Interface Software, Vision Software, Manufacturing, and Clinical Engineering.
• Participate in documenting software designs according to Intuitive's development guidelines.
• Mentor group members and interns.
• Engage in cross-functional resolution of critical problems.

Additional Responsibilities (may include one or more of the following depending upon the specific role/domain):

• Facilitate sharing of software building blocks to provide servo functionality for multiple Intuitive Surgical robotic systems, maximizing flexibility and modularity while maintaining peak performance.
• Develop a thorough system-level knowledge from a clinical user perspective.
• Consider and encourage appropriate inter-process communication software design principles.
• Coordinate a broad multi-team collaborative effort in support of the da Vinci™ simulator product family.
• Facilitate audio software architecture enhancements to enable or improve user-facing audio features.
• Oversee the design, extension, and testing of our supervisory state machine software that serves as the system’s top-level behavioral command control center.
• Develop and maintain the state machine software responsible for validating robotic instruments and transitioning between robotic surgical procedures.
• Provide leadership in multiple areas of software development, including but not limited to the following:
  • Configure and monitor custom motion control hardware.
  • Analyze real-time processing performance.
  • Extend current processing frameworks to new processors and hardware designs.
  • Design, develop, and extend offline hardware simulation environments to facilitate rapid software development and testing.
  • Maintain and extend data streaming infrastructure spanning the embedded processor network as well as interfaces serving downstream data consumers.
  • Bring up research prototypes used to evaluate new product concepts.
  • Design and develop hardware / software diagnostic tools.

Required Education and Training

• Minimum Bachelor's, Master's or PhD degree (Master's or PhD degree preferred).
• Minimum of 10 years (cumulative) industry and/or academic research/project-based experience in developing embedded systems.

Required Skills and Experience

• Experience leading a talented team of software engineers in a challenging product development environment, working on embedded, real-time application development and testing.
• Experience in developing real-time embedded software for one or more of the following areas (or similar): motion-control, robotics, automotive, aerospace/aviation.
• Experience in modern C++ and familiarity with design patterns.
• Experience in developing for embedded Linux and/or QNX at multiple levels, such as hardware bring-up, drivers, applications.
• Proficiency in written and verbal communication.
• Comfort with presenting to large or small groups.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience implementing complex software designs for embedded systems.
• Experience with scripting languages (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Matlab, etc.) for diagnostic/test automation.
• Comfort with concepts of design input, design output, traceability, and risk analysis.
• Demonstrated experience and comfort with all phases of the product development lifecycle (design, implementation, debug, verification, validation, and transfer to manufacturing).
• Experience with designing software products in an FDA or other regulated industry or for mission critical applications.

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 Employment 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.

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 salary ranges are listed.