Computer Vision Resarch 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 Role

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.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What You’ll Bring

• 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.

Nice to Have

• Experience with classical reconstruction tooling (COLMAP etc).

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

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location & Work Model

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.

Inclusive Application

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.

Equal Opportunity

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.

Candidate Privacy

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