4 jobs in Niantic Spatial

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.

We are looking for a Computer Vision Research Engineer to join our Research Team in London. Our team researches and builds the 3D reconstruction technology behind Niantic Spatial's platform. These pipelines turn casually captured or domain specific imagery into high-fidelity explorable 3D reconstructions. This entails anything from Structure-from-Motion through to 3D Gaussian Splatting and feed-forward models. Our team shipped 360 splatting to consumers and enterprise customers, developed the splatting tech that runs on phones, shipped multiple POCs to enterprise customers, and have innovated on countless AR technologies. Our team has published at top venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, SIGGRAPH); more often than not, our papers end up in production. We're hiring a researcher to work at both ends of that pipeline. You will implement and iterate on the state-of-the-art for both academic publishing and production, regularly working on prototypes with a short turnaround into customer-facing production.

You will work alongside world‑class researchers in computer vision, machine learning, graphics, and robotics to develop new approaches for large-scale spatial understanding, localization, reconstruction, scene understanding, and geospatial foundation models.

• Conduct original research in computer vision, machine learning, and spatial AI.

• Design, implement, and evaluate novel algorithms for:

  • 3D reconstruction

  • Neural scene representations

  • 3D Gaussian Splatting

  • Geometric deep learning

  • Structure-from-Motion (SfM)

  • Feed-forward models

  • Spatial foundation models

• Collaborate with research scientists and engineers to transition promising ideas into future products.

• Develop large-scale experiments and benchmarking frameworks.

• Work directly with the realities of production with real capture conditions, real hardware constraints, and real customers.

• Publish research findings at leading conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, or SIGGRAPH.

• PhD in Computer Vision, Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a closely related field. Exceptionally strong candidates with equivalent experience in industry would be considered.

• A strong research track record in 3D computer vision: reconstruction, depth estimation, novel view synthesis, SfM, SLAM, or closely related areas.

• Strong publication record at top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, etc.

• Strong programming skills in Python and experience in PyTorch.

• Evidence that you can carry an idea from research into something real; that may be a shipped feature, a production pipeline, a widely used open-source release, or similar.

• Ability to independently drive research projects from idea generation through experimentation and publication.

• Experience with classical reconstruction tooling (COLMAP etc).

• C++ or CUDA, and a feel for performance and on-device constraints.

£96,300 - £107,000 + bonus / equity / benefits

London, UK. Hybrid — at least 3 days per week in office. Niantic Spatial sponsors work visas for many roles. We can’t guarantee sponsorship for every role or every candidate, but if we make you an offer, we’ll make a reasonable effort to support your work authorization.

We know the strongest candidates don’t always tick every box. If you’re excited about this role and believe you could do it well, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed — you may be exactly who we’re looking for.

Niantic Spatial is an equal opportunity employer. Individuals seeking employment at Niantic Spatial are considered without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, creed, age, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected category under applicable laws. Niantic Spatial, will also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable laws. Please contact your recruiter if you want to request an accommodation for the job application or interview process.

I understand that by submitting my job application, the information I provide as part of that application will be used in accordance with Niantic Spatial’s Privacy Notice for Job Applicants and Candidates

At Niantic Spatial, we’re building the future of geospatial AI. Powered by a proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images and a groundbreaking third-generation digital map, our mission is to develop spatial intelligence that helps both humans and machines better understand, navigate, and engage with the physical world. Our high-fidelity mapping technology unlocks a new dimension of interaction—laying the foundation for AI to truly comprehend and operate within real-world environments. Join us as we build a living model of the world that people and machines can talk to.

As a Computer Vision Researcher with experience in Large Language Models (LLMs), you will bridge the gap between 3D computer vision LLMs, creating a unified framework where machines can reason about their surroundings. By linking spatial geometry directly to language, you will enable our systems to perform context-aware navigation and answer complex, open-ended questions about the physical world.

• Architect Semantic Grounding: Lead research into cross-modal grounding that connects 3D spatial features with language embeddings, enabling the LGM to "understand" object relationships and environmental context.

• Scale "Understand" Capabilities: Develop and deploy algorithms for continuous semantics , allowing our 3D maps to evolve and improve their situational awareness as new ground-level and aerial data is ingested.

• Agentic Frameworks: Build the "spatial brain" for Embodied AI, enabling robots, Drones and other Machines to move beyond simple navigation to mission-level reasoning.

• Multimodal Benchmarking: Define the standards for measuring "spatial common sense" in LLMs, creating evaluations that test a model’s ability to interpret and operate within complex 3D scenes.

• Technical Mentorship: Serve as the technical anchor for the London R&D hub, resolving architectural disagreements and mentoring the next generation of researchers in the fusion of 3D CV and NLP.

• Collaborative Innovation: Partner with Product leads to ensure the "Understand" API delivers high business value for enterprise customers in robotics, logistics, and field operations.

Required Qualifications:

• Education: PhD (or equivalent) in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or Robotics with a focus on Multimodal/Semantic understanding.

• Years of Experience: 4+ years of experience in ML research, with a proven track record of shipping models that bridge 3D Vision and Language .

• Technical Depth: Expert knowledge of 3D Geometry (SfM, SLAM, VPS) and Transformer-based architectures (VLMs).

• Research Impact: Multiple first-author publications at top-tier venues (CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR) focusing on VLMs, scene understanding or semantic segmentation.

• Implementation Mastery: Ability to write production-quality research code in PyTorch or JAX and manage large-scale data pipelines.

• Required In-Office Days: 3 days per week

Plus If:

• Experience with Gaussian Splatting or NeRFs for semantic scene representation.

• Background in robotics (ROS) or building agentic systems that interact with physical environments.

• Experience with "open-set" recognition and Zero-Shot learning.

Candidate Privacy Policy

I understand that by submitting my job application, the information I provide as part of that application will be used in accordance with Niantic Spatial’s Privacy Notice for Job Applicants and Candidates.

If required by law, by submitting my job application I consent to the processing of my information as described in that Notice, including processing information I voluntarily disclose to Niantic Spatial, such as health or medical information, race or ethnicity data, and sexual orientation data and, in limited circumstances sharing information with third parties such as references and other third parties that assist in the hiring process.

Niantic Spatial is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with reasonable accommodation during the application process, please contact your recruiter.