{"id":1478595,"url":"https://alion.io/job/niantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab","title":"Hardware Operations Engineer - Robotics, Real-World Test Lab","company":{"id":171874,"name":"Niantic Spatial","domain":"nianticspatial.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/niantic-spatial","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":142200,"max":193000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":193000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Sim-to-Real","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Lab","optional":true},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":true},{"name":"ROS","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-29T17:50:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T18:59:31Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":15,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":15},"description":"About Niantic Spatial\nAt 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.\nOur 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.\nAbout the Real-World Test Lab (RWTL)\n Physical AI doesn't get graded on a leaderboard. It gets graded on a factory floor at shift change, in a substation with no GPS, on a site where the lighting is wrong and the stakes are real.\nThe Real-World Test Lab closes the gap between the benchmark and the field. We bring the customer's world inside our walls - their devices, their environments, their hardest conditions, and their definition of success - and make it the bar every release has to clear.\nAs Niantic Spatial's first and most demanding customer, we push our reconstruction, localization, and spatial understanding to their limits, find where they shine and where they break, and turn that into evidence that shapes what we build next. It's a new team at the frontier of physical AI, and you'll help invent how the job is done.\nAbout the Role\nWe're hiring a Hardware Operations Engineer with a robotics specialism, reporting to the Director of the Real-World Test Lab, to own the physical layer of our evidence. You'll manage our fleet of capture devices and robots, engineer the test environments and the instrumentation inside them, support the captures our data programs depend on, and run physical test sessions, including the real-robot side of our sim-to-real work.\nA physical run only counts as evidence if the hardware is characterized, the environment is controlled, the ground truth is trustworthy, and someone can reproduce the run months later. You'll build what makes that possible: fixtures, ground-truth references, calibration and data-offload tooling, and the integrations that feed physical runs into the same automated evaluation system as everything else.\nYou engineer the conditions, not just the setup. When a physical result didn't match expectations, you've worked out whether the hardware, calibration, environment, or system under test was responsible. Then you built the rig, reference, or logging that kept the question from coming back. You know an uninstrumented physical test is an anecdote, and in the Lab you'll be the person who can say with authority whether a strange result is real.\nWhat Success Looks Like\n30 days: Fleet inventory and characterization baseline complete, safe operating procedures defined for current spaces, and first instrumentation gaps identified.\n\n60 days: First physical robot run executed with ground-truth instrumentation, documented well enough to repeat, with results in the Lab's evaluation system.\n\n90 days: Test environments in regular use with controlled, documented conditions; capture support running smoothly with our data acquisition team; and the physical side of sim-to-real running on a standing instrumented protocol.\n\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn and Characterize the Fleet - Manage our capture devices, sensors, and robots end to end: inventory, calibration, firmware, maintenance, logistics, and spares. Characterize what each platform can and cannot do, so a device's limits are a known quantity rather than a surprise inside a result.\n\nEngineer the Physical Test Environments - Design, build, and operate the spaces we test in, covering layout, lighting control, markers, obstacle configurations, and survey-grade ground truth references, across our office, rented or workplace-services-supported space, and partner or customer sites. Make each environment a controlled variable rather than an improvisation.\n\nBuild the Instrumentation - Create the rigs, mounts, references, and measurement setups that turn a physical run into quantitative data: trajectory ground truth, positional accuracy references, timing and synchronization across sensors, and automated condition logging.\n\nIntegrate Physical Runs Into the Evaluation System - Work with the AI Automation Engineer so physical results flow into the same scorecards and comparisons as software-only evaluations, through automated data offload, run metadata, and structured condition capture rather than a spreadsheet and a folder of files.\n\nRun the Physical Test Sessions - Execute robot runs and device-in-the-loop tests: robot bring-up, teleoperation, scripted trials, and the repetition that makes a result statistically meaningful rather than anecdotal.\n\nOwn the Physical Half of Sim-to-Real - When a scenario has been evaluated in simulation, engineer and execute its physical counterpart so the comparison is valid, matching environment, route, lighting, sensor configuration, and robot setup, and instrumenting the run so divergence is explainable rather than mysterious.\n\nOwn Safety - Define and maintain safe operating procedures for robots and powered equipment in our test spaces, and coordinate with workplace services, IT, Legal, and site owners on access and safety requirements.\n\nAutomate Your Own Work - Script the repetitive parts, including configuration, calibration checks, data offload, and condition logging, so setup time falls and a colleague can run a session without you.\n\nWhat You'll Bring\nHands-on engineering experience with robotic hardware, covering bring-up, integration, teleoperation, troubleshooting, and maintenance. Mobile or wheeled platforms preferred.\n\nBuilt test rigs, fixtures, or instrumentation that produced quantitative measurements of a physical system's behavior.\n\nDesigned and run structured physical experiments, including ground truth methodology, and documented conditions rigorously enough for someone else to reproduce them.\n\nWorked with sensor calibration, multi-sensor synchronization, and coordinate frame conventions, and understand how errors in each propagate into a result.\n\nStrong Python and command-line proficiency, with a track record of automating hardware configuration, data offload, or test execution.\n\nManaged hardware fleets operationally: inventory, firmware, calibration schedules, logistics, and repair coordination.\n\nPractical safety experience operating powered equipment or robots around people.\n\nA bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent experience.\n\nNice to Have\nWorked with ROS or ROS 2, including writing nodes or integrating sensor drivers.\n\nOperated NVIDIA Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab as a user, running scenarios someone else authored.\n\nWorked with professional capture hardware such as terrestrial laser scanners, NavVis or Leica systems, LiDAR, 360 cameras, or drones.\n\nEstablished survey-grade or motion-capture ground truth for localization or navigation evaluation.\n\nSupported photogrammetry, Gaussian splat, or 3D reconstruction capture workflows.\n\nRun test operations at customer or partner sites, with the coordination and discretion that requires.\n\nCompetencies\nEngineering judgment about physical systems. You reason about error sources: calibration drift, timing offsets, mounting rigidity, lighting variation, floor surface. When results disagree, you form a hypothesis and design the measurement that settles it.\n\nHands-on and unfazed. You'd rather be in the space with the robot than reading about it. Cables, mounts, batteries, firmware, and a session that starts at 7am are all part of the job.\n\nMeticulous about conditions. You instrument rather than remember. You know the value of a physical test lives in how precisely its conditions were captured.\n\nSafety-minded without being slow. You take real responsibility for operating robots around people, and you build procedures where the safe path is also the fast path.\n\nBuilds for other people. Your fixtures, scripts, and procedures get used by colleagues without you in the room.\n\nComfortable in an unfinished environment. Much of this does not exist yet. You'll be selecting equipment, designing the first rigs, and defining how a space gets configured, with support but without a playbook.\n\nCompensation & Benefits\nBase salary range of $142,200 to $193,000. Compensation also includes an annual bonus, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and more.\nLocation & Work Model\nThis role is based in our San Francisco office, with three days per week in office.\nInclusive Application\nWe 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.\nEqual Opportunity\nNiantic 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.\nCandidate Privacy\nI understand that by submitting my job application, the information I provide as part of that application will be used in accordance with Niantic Spatial's Privacy Notice for Job Applicants and Candidates https://www.nianticspatial.com/applicant-privacy-notice.","description_format":"text","description_chars":10091,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Space & Aerospace","Foundation Models"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T19:26:16Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 9","filings_12m":9,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":172500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-03T21:08:04+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":88,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.877,"p_room":1,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early","comp:attention"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":193000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/niantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/niantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T19:50:31Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":26196,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":171874},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=171874"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fniantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fniantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fniantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/niantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fniantic-spatial-hardware-operations-engineer-robotics-real-world-test-lab"}]}