Niantic Spatial
Hardware Operations Engineer - Robotics, Real-World Test Lab
$142K–$193K
San Francisco, CA · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 29, 2026
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Own the hardware, test environments, instrumentation, and robot testing that make physical evaluations reproducible and comparable with simulation and software evaluations.
What you'll do
- Manage and characterize capture devices, sensors, and robots, including calibration, maintenance, firmware, and logistics.
- Build controlled test environments and instrumentation for ground truth, synchronization, and quantitative measurement.
- Run physical robot and device tests, integrate results into the evaluation system, and establish safe, repeatable procedures.
What they ask for
- Hands-on robotic hardware experience, including bring-up, integration, teleoperation, troubleshooting, and maintenance.
- Experience building test rigs, fixtures, or instrumentation for quantitative measurement and running reproducible physical experiments.
- Experience with sensor calibration, multi-sensor synchronization, and coordinate frame conventions.
- Strong Python and command-line proficiency; operational hardware fleet management; practical robot or powered-equipment safety experience.
Nice to have
- Experience with ROS or ROS 2, or NVIDIA Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab.
- Experience with professional capture hardware, survey-grade or motion-capture ground truth, 3D reconstruction workflows, or customer/partner test operations.
Pay
$142,200 to $193,000 (base salary)
Tools
Python, ROS, ROS 2, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, LiDAR
AI focus
Supports physical AI evaluation by testing robotics, reconstruction, localization, and spatial understanding in controlled real-world conditions, including sim-to-real comparisons.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative