Computer Vision Researcher (VLM)

At Niantic Spatial were building the future of geospatial AI. Powered by a proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images and a groundbreaking third-generation digital map our mission is to develop spatial intelligence that helps both humans and machines better understand navigate and engage with the physical world. Our high-fidelity mapping technology unlocks a new dimension of interactionlaying the foundation for AI to truly comprehend and operate within real-world environments. Join us as we build a living model of the world that people and machines can talk to.

As a Computer Vision Researcher with experience in Large Language Models (LLMs) you will bridge the gap between 3D computer vision LLMs creating a unified framework where machines can reason about their surroundings. By linking spatial geometry directly to language you will enable our systems to perform context-aware navigation and answer complex open-ended questions about the physical world.

• Architect Semantic Grounding: Lead research into cross-modal grounding that connects 3D spatial features with language embeddings enabling the LGM to understand object relationships and environmental context.

• Scale Understand Capabilities: Develop and deploy algorithms for continuous semantics allowing our 3D maps to evolve and improve their situational awareness as new ground-level and aerial data is ingested.

• Agentic Frameworks: Build the spatial brain for Embodied AI enabling robots Drones and other Machines to move beyond simple navigation to mission-level reasoning.

• Multimodal Benchmarking: Define the standards for measuring spatial common sense in LLMs creating evaluations that test a models ability to interpret and operate within complex 3D scenes.

• Technical Mentorship: Serve as the technical anchor for the London R&D hub resolving architectural disagreements and mentoring the next generation of researchers in the fusion of 3D CV and NLP.

• Collaborative Innovation: Partner with Product leads to ensure the Understand API delivers high business value for enterprise customers in robotics logistics and field operations.

Required Qualifications:

• Education: PhD (or equivalent) in Computer Vision Machine Learning or Robotics with a focus on Multimodal/Semantic understanding.

• Years of Experience: 4 years of experience in ML research with a proven track record of shipping models that bridge 3D Vision and Language.

• Technical Depth: Expert knowledge of 3D Geometry (SfM SLAM VPS) and Transformer-based architectures (VLMs).

• Research Impact: Multiple first-author publications at top-tier venues (CVPR NeurIPS ICLR) focusing on VLMs scene understanding or semantic segmentation.

• Implementation Mastery: Ability to write production-quality research code in PyTorch or JAX and manage large-scale data pipelines.

• Required In-Office Days: 3 days per week

Plus If:

• Experience with Gaussian Splatting or NeRFs for semantic scene representation.

• Background in robotics (ROS) or building agentic systems that interact with physical environments.

• Experience with open-set recognition and Zero-Shot learning.

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Required Experience:

IC