Sr. Simulation & Synthetic Data Engineer

About the job

Job Description

About the Team

Future Forward Research — Synthetic Data, builds the simulation and data infrastructure that powers Intuitive's autonomous surgical capabilities.

The Role

You'll build the virtual surgical worlds and the data pipelines that train our perception and policy models. Day to day, that means designing simulation environments, generating large volumes of labeled synthetic data, and working with ML engineers to close the sim-to-real gap for robotic surgery. It's a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of 3D simulation, machine learning, and robotics.

What You'll Do

• Design and build high-fidelity simulation environments for surgical tasks.
• Generate scalable synthetic datasets including photo realistic imagery, segmentation masks, depth, optical flow, and kinematic state — and own their quality, versioning, and delivery.
• Implement domain randomization and procedural scene generation to maximize sim-to-real transfer.
• Model deformable soft-tissue physics, tool-tissue contact, and instrument kinematics that match Intuitive's platforms.
• Partner with ML engineers to define task curricula, reward functions, and evaluation benchmarks.
• Develop and refine sim-to-real transfer strategies, and validate simulated behaviors against benchtop phantoms and real systems.
• Build reusable tools, APIs, and documentation so the broader team can spin up new tasks without deep simulation expertise.