Staff Engineer - Robot Learning, Embodied AI

The role

You will lead engineering for the real-to-sim product within the Embodied AI group. You will inform the roadmap, own technical requirements, and personally prototype and evaluate changes to the real-to-sim stack.

What you will do

• Bring knowledge of customer pain and existing solutions to roadmap decisions.
• Guide the team to design the real-to-sim stack pragmatically.
• Make final recommendations on what to build, integrate, and simplify.
• Design and run reproducible evaluations to measure impact on policy transfer and real-world performance.
• Lead engineering delivery and personally build critical features.
• Set a high bar for the team's work and deepen understanding of robotics development and deployment.

Required qualifications

• Experience training, evaluating, and deploying robot policies in systems used by enterprise or government customers.
• Deep practical experience using simulation for policy training or evaluation, including tools such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or both.
• Hands-on experience with deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Practical understanding of how visual perception and 3D scene representations affect robotics training, evaluation, and real-world performance.
• Experience running experiments on real robots.
• Strong Python and C++ skills.
• Experience building reliable production software.
• A bachelor's degree or higher in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• Authored or maintained a public robotics benchmark.
• Helped take an early product to repeatable adoption across multiple customers.
• Built or substantially extended robotics simulation infrastructure, including scene authoring, domain randomization, or large-scale training and evaluation.
• Trained and deployed vision-based navigation or mobility policies, particularly in varied, unstructured environments.
• Built pipelines that turn real-world reconstructions into simulation-ready environments.

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Comprehensive benefits package

About the company

Niantic Spatial builds spatial AI models and services so people and machines can reason, learn and act safely in the physical world. They turn camera imagery, video, sensor data and archives into accurate, AI-readable representations of real places.