Principal Architect, Product Engineering
Niantic SpatialBase Salary
$275k - $310k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and evolve the long-term technical architecture for the Product Engineering ecosystem.
- Establish consistent architectural patterns, engineering standards, design principles, and reference architectures across products and teams.
- Lead architecture reviews and guide system decomposition, API design, data architecture, integration patterns, and platform evolution.
- Design and prototype complex solutions and contribute production code in strategically important areas.
- Review critical designs, resolve cross-cutting technical challenges, and mentor senior engineers and technical leads.
- Partner with Product Management and Research on technical strategy, roadmaps, and productization of emerging technologies.
- Facilitate technical alignment across Engineering, Research, Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and Delivery.
- Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt, and improve developer productivity.
Requirements
- 15+ years of software engineering experience designing and building large-scale software systems.
- Demonstrated success defining architecture across multiple products, services, and engineering teams.
- Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native services, APIs, and developer platforms.
- Strong software engineering background with experience contributing production code in complex systems.
- Expertise in software architecture, system design, and engineering best practices.
- Experience partnering with product organizations to shape technical strategy around customer outcomes.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
- Preferred experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or API ecosystems.
- Preferred experience productizing research-driven technologies.
- Preferred background in computer vision, spatial computing, AR/VR, robotics, or edge computing.
- Preferred experience with Google Cloud Platform, distributed data systems, identity platforms, and modern web architectures.
- Preferred experience designing systems spanning cloud services, web applications, mobile applications, and native runtimes.
- Experience with AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering workflows is a plus.
Benefits
- Annual bonus and equity are included in compensation.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- 401(k) and additional benefits.
- Based in the San Francisco, California office on a hybrid schedule with a minimum of three days per week in office.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Niantic Spatial
First, our founders brought digital mapping to the world. Next, we invented global-scale AR. Now we're building the real-world foundation model for people, AI and robots. We're building for the 80% of economic activity that takes place beyond our screens: robots that lose GPS and drift off course, defense teams with no shared 3D picture of where they operate, facilities where downtime costs millions. Unlike LLMs, which understand language, we build computer-vision models that understand physical space. And unlike generated environments, our models are geometrically accurate and have real-world coordinates - which is what makes physical AI precise and trustworthy. We work across three capabilities for our customers: reconstructing physical spaces as AI-native digital twins using cheap, off-the-shelf cameras; locating and orienting – “localizing” – machines and people within those spaces; and enabling AI to understand and answer questions about the real world.