Robotics Hardware Operations Engineer

Niantic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 142,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Job summary

Niantic Spatial is seeking a Hardware Operations Engineer to own the physical layer of our evidence. You’ll manage a fleet of capture devices and robots, engineer test environments, and develop instrumentation for quantitative, reproducible test runs on real hardware.

You will calibrate sensors, run scripted trials, and integrate results into the evaluation system, ensuring safety and automation across the lab’s workflows.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineering experience with robotic hardware, bring-up, integration, and maintenance.
• Built test rigs, fixtures, or instrumentation that produced quantitative measurements of a physical system.
• Experience with sensor calibration, multi-sensor synchronization, and coordinate frame conventions.

Responsibilities

• Own and characterize the fleet of capture devices and robots, including inventory, calibration, firmware, maintenance, logistics, and spares.
• Engineer physical test environments with lighting control, markers, and ground-truth references to ensure controlled variables.
• Build instrumentation to turn physical runs into quantitative data (trajectory ground truth, timing, synchronization).
• Integrate physical runs into the evaluation system with automated data offload and run metadata.
• Run robot bring-up, teleoperation, scripted trials, and repeatable tests for statistical validity.
• Own the physical half of sim-to-real, matching environment and sensor configuration to simulation results.
• Define and maintain safe operating procedures for robots and powered equipment.
• Automate configuration, calibration checks, data offload, and condition logging.

Skills

Robotic hardware

Teleoperation

Automation scripting

Python

Hardware bring-up

Maintenance

Safety

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

ROS

NVIDIA Isaac

Isaac Sim

LiDAR

360 cameras

Job description

Niantic Spatial is seeking a Hardware Operations Engineer to own the physical layer of our evidence. You’ll manage a fleet of capture devices and robots, engineer test environments, and develop instrumentation for quantitative, reproducible test runs on real hardware.

You will calibrate sensors, run scripted trials, and integrate results into the evaluation system, ensuring safety and automation across the lab’s workflows.