Hardware Operations Engineer - Robotics, Real-World Test Lab

The role

You will manage a fleet of capture devices and robots and engineer physical test environments. You will build instrumentation, run physical test sessions, and integrate physical runs into the evaluation system.

What you will do

• Manage capture devices, sensors, and robots including inventory, calibration, firmware, maintenance, logistics, and spares.
• Design, build, and operate physical test environments including layout, lighting control, markers, and obstacle configurations.
• Create rigs, mounts, references, and measurement setups for quantitative data.
• Integrate physical results into the evaluation system through automated data offload and structured condition capture.
• Execute robot runs and device-in-the-loop tests including teleoperation and scripted trials.
• Engineer physical counterparts for scenarios evaluated in simulation.
• Define and maintain safe operating procedures for robots and powered equipment.
• Automate repetitive tasks including configuration, calibration checks, and data offload.

Required qualifications

• Hands-on engineering experience with robotic hardware, covering bring-up, integration, teleoperation, troubleshooting, and maintenance.
• Experience building test rigs, fixtures, or instrumentation that produced quantitative measurements.
• Experience designing and running structured physical experiments with ground truth methodology.
• Experience with sensor calibration, multi-sensor synchronization, and coordinate frame conventions.
• Strong Python and command-line proficiency.
• Experience managing hardware fleets operationally.
• Practical safety experience operating powered equipment or robots around people.
• A bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Worked with ROS or ROS 2, including writing nodes or integrating sensor drivers.
• Operated NVIDIA Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab as a user.
• Worked with professional capture hardware such as terrestrial laser scanners, NavVis or Leica systems, LiDAR, 360 cameras, or drones.
• Established survey-grade or motion-capture ground truth for localization or navigation evaluation.
• Supported photogrammetry, Gaussian splat, or 3D reconstruction capture workflows.
• Run test operations at customer or partner sites.

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• 401(k)
• And more

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.