Database Platform Engineering Intern

About Intuitive

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 Position

The Database Platform Engineering team is responsible for managing and modernizing the infrastructure that powers our global data services. This Database Platform Engineering Intern role reports to the Manager of Database Engineering and works at the intersection of traditional database management and modern cloud-native platform engineering. The intern will focus on automating database lifecycles, improving high availability, and exploring innovative scaling solutions for our next-generation robotic surgery platforms.

Essential Job Duties

• Automation & CI/CD: Assist in building and maintaining automated pipelines for database provisioning, securing, access controls and configuration using Liquibase Gitlab.
• Cloud-Native Exploration: Deploy and manage stateful database workloads on Kubernetes using Stateful Sets and Database Operators.
• Platform Modernization: Research and prototype Database features to identify vertical and horizontal scaling benefits, and Blue-Green deployments.
• High Availability & DR: Document and test disaster recovery (DR) playbooks and high availability (HA) configurations for Database solutions.
• Process Improvement: Write scripts in Python or Shell to automate manual database tasks and improve system reliability.
• Collaborative Design: Participate in technical design reviews and collaborate with software and hardware engineers to ensure seamless system integration.

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 after the internship.
• Internship Work Period: Must be available to work 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.
• Technical Foundations: Strong understanding of relational and non-relational database core concepts (SQL, indexing, ACID properties).
• Programming: Industry experience or academic proficiency in at least one major programming language (Python, Terraform, PowerShell, Bash).

Required Education And Training

• Current enrollment in a Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical degree-seeking program at the Bachelor’s or Master’s level.
• Doctorate level students will also be considered based on specific relevant experience in distributed systems or database research.

Preferred Skills And Experience

• Modern DataBase Stack: Familiarity with Postgress, Sqlserver, Snowflake or MongoDB and their respective scaling/automation tools.
• Orchestration: Hands-on experience or coursework involving Docker and Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Exposure to automation tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• Public Cloud: Interest in cloud technologies including AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills to document technical work for diverse engineering teams.

Key skills/competency

• Database Management
• Cloud-Native
• Kubernetes
• Automation
• CI/CD
• Python Scripting
• SQL
• High Availability
• Disaster Recovery
• Terraform