Hardware Operations Engineer

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 Real-World Test Lab (RWTL)
**Physical AI doesn't get graded on a leaderboard. It gets graded on a factory floor at shift change, in a substation with no GPS, on a site where the lighting is wrong and the stakes are real.

The Real-World Test Lab closes the gap between the benchmark and the field. We bring the customer's world inside our walls — their devices, their environments, their hardest conditions, and their definition of success — and make it the bar every release has to clear.

As Niantic Spatial's first and most demanding customer, we push our reconstruction, localization, and spatial understanding to their limits, find where they shine and where they break, and turn that into evidence that shapes what we build next. It's a new team at the frontier of physical AI, and you'll help invent how the job is done.

About the Role

We're hiring a Hardware Operations Engineer with a robotics specialism, reporting to the Director of the Real-World Test Lab, to own the physical layer of our evidence. You'll manage our fleet of capture devices and robots, engineer the test environments and the instrumentation inside them, support the captures our data programs depend on, and run physical test sessions, including the real-robot side of our sim-to-real work.

A physical run only counts as evidence if the hardware is characterized, the environment is controlled, the ground truth is trustworthy, and someone can reproduce the run months later. You'll build what makes that possible: fixtures, ground-truth references, calibration and data-offload tooling, and the integrations that feed physical runs into the same automated evaluation system as everything else.

You engineer the conditions, not just the setup. When a physical result didn't match expectations, you've worked out whether the hardware, calibration, environment, or system under test was responsible. Then you built the rig, reference, or logging that kept the question from coming back. You know an uninstrumented physical test is an anecdote, and in the Lab you'll be the person who can say with authority whether a strange result is real.