UK remote
3D Computer Vision Research Engineer - World Map
About this role
About Niantic Spatial AI has learned from almost everything online, but it still struggles with the physical world, where 99.5% of economic activity happens. It doesn’t know where things are, how spaces fit together, or what changes over time. That’s one of the biggest unsolved problems in AI, and it’s the one we’re solving at Niantic Spatial. We build spatial AI models and services so people and machines can reason, learn and act safely in the physical world.
We turn camera imagery, video, sensor data and archives into accurate, AI-readable representations of real places that robots can train in and machines can use to know exactly where they are. In physical AI, mistakes have real consequences. That’s why we build AI grounded in measured reality, not guesswork, so the people and machines relying on it can trust it to get things right. Our team built some of the world’s most widely used maps.
Now we’re building something bigger: a living, measured record of the real world that machines can query, learn from and use to understand how places change over time. If you want to help AI understand the world we actually live in, come build with us. About the Role You'll help build the geometric foundation of the next-generation world map — joining our World Map Research Engineering team (Geospatial Alignment) as a Research Engineer or Senior Research Engineer.
This is an end-to-end applied research role that spans from strong engineering and data-systems work to R&D in 3D deep learning, transformers, and foundation models. You'll develop new algorithms, produce the research data and evaluation assets needed to advance them, and engineer the resulting capabilities into dependable production systems. The World Map team works with heterogeneous captures from phones and handheld devices, aerial imagery, LiDAR, and 360 cameras, as well as external geographic and elevation data.
The central challenge is to harmonize these data sources, quantify uncertainty, and maintain consistency as the map evolves. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and scalable engineering — developing new approaches to geospatial registration, correspondence, and geometric optimization, then productionizing these technologies to directly improve Niantic Spatial's world model. What You'll Do Geospatial Registration — Develop and advance algorithms for world-scale georeferencing and registration across imagery, 3D reconstructions, point clouds, and geographic reference data.