# Research Engineer / Scientist (SLAM)

**Company**: World Labs
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $250,000-$350,000 base salary (good-faith estimate for San Francisco Bay Area upon hire; actual offer based on experience, skills, and qualifications)
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/worldlabs/jobs/4135311009
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_19b66bec-a6b

## Description

We're looking for a Research Engineer/Scientist to design, implement, and advance state-of-the-art simultaneous localization and mapping systems. This role is focused on modern SLAM techniques,both classical and learning-based,with an emphasis on scalable state estimation, sensor fusion, and long-term mapping in complex, dynamic environments.

As a Research Engineer/Scientist, you will:

* Design and implement modern SLAM systems for real-world environments, including visual, visual-inertial, lidar, or multi-sensor configurations.
* Develop robust localization and mapping pipelines, including pose estimation, map management, loop closure, and global optimization.
* Research and prototype learning-based or hybrid SLAM approaches that combine classical geometry with modern machine learning methods.
* Build and maintain scalable state estimation frameworks, including factor graph optimization, filtering, and smoothing techniques.
* Develop sensor fusion strategies that integrate cameras, IMUs, depth sensors, lidar, or other modalities to improve robustness and accuracy.
* Analyze failure modes in real-world SLAM deployments (e.g., perceptual aliasing, dynamic scenes, drift) and design principled solutions.
* Create evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and metrics to measure SLAM accuracy, robustness, and performance across large datasets.
* Optimize performance across the stack, including real-time constraints, memory usage, and compute efficiency, for large-scale and production systems.
* Collaborate with reconstruction, simulation, and infrastructure teams to ensure SLAM outputs integrate cleanly with downstream world modeling and rendering pipelines.
* Contribute to technical direction by proposing new research ideas, mentoring teammates, and helping define best practices for localization and mapping across the organization.

We're looking for someone with 6+ years of experience working on SLAM, state estimation, robotics perception, or related areas. A strong foundation in probabilistic estimation, optimization, and geometric vision is required, as well as proficiency in Python and/or C++.

## Skills

### Required
- SLAM
- state estimation
- robotics perception
- probabilistic estimation
- optimization
- geometric vision
- Python
- C++