AI Research Intern
Posted on 11/26/2025

Intuitive Surgical
No salary listed
Sunnyvale, CA, USA
In Person
Job Description
Primary Function of Position
We are seeking a self-motivated intern to support our AI Research and Development team in projects focused on developing a variety of AI foundation models based on multi-modal surgical data. This role is an exciting opportunity to join a newly formed team, advance the state-of-the-art in surgical robotics, and test your knowledge in a challenging problem-solving environment.
Essential Job Duties
- Research, design and implement AI algorithms using multi-modal data including image, video, text, and robotics.
- Develop software and methods for training, evaluation and testing such AI algorithms.
- Develop evaluation metrics in the context of specific applications and perform extensive validation experiments to analyze accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability.
- Work with existing datasets and contribute to efforts in creating new datasets.
Qualifications
Required Skills and Experience
University Hiring Program Eligibility Requirements:
- University Enrollment: Must be currently enrolled in and returning to an accredited degree-seeking academic program in the Fall.
- Internship Work Period: Must be available to work starting October 2024 and full-time (approximately 40 hours per week) during a 10-12 week period starting May or June. Specific start dates are shared during the recruiting process.
Required Education and Training
Current enrollment in an Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Robotics with emphasis on AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision or related degree-seeking program at the Master’s or Doctorate level.
Preferred Skills and Experience
- Publications in top-tier conferences/journals
- Experience building systems based on machine learning and/or deep learning methods.
- Strong hands-on Python skills.
- Strong hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Caffe.
- Good hands-on experience with the state-of-the-art deep learning models for language modelling and text retrieval of structured and unstructured text.
- Good hands-on experience with open-source LLM models and libraries (HuggingFace, LLaMa, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc).
- Self-starter and able to work in a collaborative and results oriented environment.
- (Preferred) Experience extending and innovating on LLM/AI agent techniques. Experience in one or more of RLHF, DPO, finetuning, RAG, CoT, and multi-agent reasoning.
- (Preferred) Experience with model quantization, LLM edge hardware deployment, prompt engineering, and/or data synthesis.
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