Principal Architect, Product Engineering

About Niantic Spatial

We're building the future of physical AI. Our proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images powers groundbreaking mapping technology that enhances human and machine interaction with the real environment. We serve customers in robotics, public sector, and energy and industrial markets.

About The Role

The Principal Architect is the technical steward for the Product Engineering organization. This role ensures that all products, platforms, APIs, SDKs, and services align into a cohesive, scalable ecosystem. It is one of the most senior individual contributor roles within Product Engineering, requiring hands-on engineering and active engagement in technology implementation and evolution.

What You'll Do

• Define and evolve the long-term technical architecture for the Product Engineering ecosystem.

• Ensure products, services, SDKs, and applications share consistent architectural patterns and engineering principles.

• Balance short-term product delivery with long-term platform health and maintainability.

• Drive architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, security, developer experience, and operational simplicity.

• Partner closely with Product Management to understand product strategy and ensure technical investments support long-term customer value.

• Collaborate with Research to evaluate emerging technologies and define clear paths to productization.

• Help translate product vision into technical roadmaps and implementation strategies.

• Lead architecture reviews across Product Engineering.

• Establish engineering standards, design principles, and reference architectures.

• Guide system decomposition, API design, data architecture, integration patterns, and platform evolution.

• Ensure architectural consistency across cloud services, APIs, web applications, mobile applications, and native SDKs.

• Design and prototype complex technical solutions.

• Contribute production code in areas of strategic importance.

• Review critical designs and implementation approaches.

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads on architecture, software design, and engineering best practices.

• Aid engineering teams in solving difficult cross-cutting technical challenges.

• Build strong technical partnerships across Engineering, Research, Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and Delivery.

• Facilitate technical alignment across multiple engineering teams.

• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt, and improve developer productivity.

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to Product Engineering leadership.

What You'll Bring

• 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 designing distributed systems, cloud-native services, APIs, and developer platforms.

• Strong software engineering background with experience contributing production code in complex systems.

• Expertise in modern software architecture, system design, and engineering best practices.

• Experience partnering closely with product organizations to shape technical strategy around customer outcomes.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries.

• Nice to have:

  • Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or API ecosystems.

  • Experience productizing research-driven technologies.

  • Background in computer vision, spatial computing, AR/VR, robotics, or edge computing.

  • Experience with Google Cloud Platform, distributed data systems, identity platforms, and modern web architectures.

  • Experience designing systems spanning cloud services, web applications, mobile applications, and native runtimes.

  • Experience with AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering workflows.

Core Technologies

• Distributed systems

• Google Cloud Platform

• Amazon Web Services

• REST APIs

• TypeScript / Node.js

• C++

• Swift

• Kotlin

• PostgreSQL / Spanner

• Identity and Access Management

• Mobile and native SDK architecture

• Computer vision and spatial computing

• Cloud architecture

• System design

• AI-assisted software development

Compensation & Benefits

The expected salary range for this role is $275,000 – $310,000 per year. Compensation also includes an annual bonus, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and more.

Location & Work Model

This role is based in our San Francisco, CA office on a hybrid schedule with a minimum of 3 days per week in office.

Candidate Privacy

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