Engineer
US$270,000 – US$300,000 / yr base salary
Posted 2 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Staff Engineer - Robot Learning, Embodied AI”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Hybrid
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$270,000 – US$300,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyRelevant Field
Study levelBachelor's
About Niantic Spatial
At Niantic Spatial, we're building the future of physical AI. Powered by a proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images, our groundbreaking mapping technology unlocks a new dimension of interaction and spatial intelligence that helps both humans and machines better understand, represent, navigate, and engage with the real environment.
Our reconstruction technology captures environments with geometric accuracy and extreme detail from any standard camera, and our Visual Positioning System delivers precise positioning almost anywhere in the world. We serve customers across robotics, the public sector, and energy and industrial markets - building for the 80% of economic activity that takes place beyond our screens.
About the Role
Niantic Spatial makes the physical world computable, helping people and machines collaborate safely by aligning how they understand reality. One of the fundamental problems we're helping autonomy teams and engineers overcome is the sim-to-real gap for visual-spatial understanding. We're applying our team's decades of experience encoding the world precisely as it is at Google Maps, Google Earth, and Niantic Labs to build the scalable real-to-sim stack for embodied AI.
We're looking for a Staff Engineer, Robot Learning to lead engineering for our real-to-sim product within the Embodied AI group. One of the fundamental problems facing autonomy teams is the sim-to-real gap in visual-spatial understanding, and we're applying decades of experience encoding the world precisely as it is to build the scalable real-to-sim stack for embodied AI.
Working alongside the group's General Manager and Product leader, you'll inform the roadmap, own the technical requirements our researchers and engineers build against, and personally prototype and evaluate the changes you propose. You've lived the problems our customers are solving: you've trained and deployed embodied AI systems, seen where and why simulation fails to predict real-world performance, and worked through the consequences.
This is not a role for someone who wants to manage and not ship, or someone who wants to ship without ownership of commercial consequences. This is a role for an entrepreneurial tech lead who loves to build and is energized by helping those around them do the best work of their lives. You have a co-founder mentality. You may have been part of a founding team before, or want to start your own business one day.
What You'll Do
-
Sharpen the Roadmap - Bring first-hand knowledge of customer pain, existing solutions, and the value of doing better to roadmap decisions, and help focus effort on the most consequential problems to solve.