Software Engineer, Niantic
Server/Backend
$151-210k
Plus equity and bonus
2 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
Augmented reality software development
Job no longer available
Augmented reality software development
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$151-210k
Plus equity and bonus
2 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Niantic's mission is to shape a future where technology enables novel robotics, computing, and entertainment experiences, focusing predominantly on augmented reality games.
Role
Who you are
- We seek engineers with strong technical background, great execution, and self-starter mentality
- The ideal candidate loves to jump into the unknown, clarify ambiguities, quickly learn from failures, and break down vague ideas into concrete tasks
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, or a related technical field
- Minimum of 2+ years of experience building reliable scalable platforms
- Proficiency in one of the following languages: Java, Go or C++ with working knowledge of Python, SQL
- Experience building networked and distributed systems
- Experience building concurrent and multi-threaded services
- Delivered solutions to production environments, and provided tools to monitor, support and mitigate any issues
- Ability to work in a fast-paced hybrid environment and handle stress appropriately and/or ability to solve practical problems and be sufficiently adaptable to handle dynamic situations with little advance notice
- Experience working on cross-functional teams with ability to communicate effectively through written and verbal communications, including synchronous interactions with others
Desirable
- Experience with deployment on hosting providers, such as Google Cloud, Azure or AWS
- Experience with building ETL pipelines or crafting data-related ingestion APIs
- Familiarity with one or more open source projects, such as Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, ElasticSearch and Envoy
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (such as Terraform)
- Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading projects
What the job involves
- Niantic is seeking a Software Engineer - Server to build the server infrastructure that supports projects such as Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom and Ingress
- You will work on real-time indexing, querying and aggregation problems at massive scales of hundreds of millions of events per day
- These technical challenges pertain to a single, coherent world-wide instance shared by millions of users
- Build and design reliable, high-throughput, low latency and scalable server and networking systems that support Niantic’s developers and products
- Build key components of the platform that developers can incorporate to create rich experiences in their games
- Perform load testing, participate in code reviews, write unit tests, and conduct troubleshooting to ensure uptime for live systems
- Collaborate with other specialists, product managers, and other departments to ensure code meets internal standards
- Collaborate with cross-functional team members and stakeholders, including regular and reliable attendance and participation in meetings
- Required in-office 2 days on Wednesday and Thursday
Our take
Niantic, Inc. is a software development company creating augmented reality mobile games, such as Ingress, Pokémon Go, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, that encourage players to go outside, explore, and meet people. The company was formed in 2010 as an internal startup within Google. Since its inception, hundreds of millions of people have used its products and services.
Although Niantic made a name for itself in the mobile gaming industry through the success of Pokémon Go, the company is hoping to become a platform for other developers to build location-aware AR apps on top of. In 2022, it released a location mapping software for AR, allowing AR experiences to be grounded to a physical location, like the front of a building or a park monument, rather than just floating aimlessly through a phone’s camera view.
Niantic plans to use this platform for an AR-based metaverse, an alternative to Meta’s plans for a VR-based metaverse that renders us bound to VR headsets. The company believes that an AR metaverse on a 3D map of the world will play a critical role in the next transition in computing, and raised funds to make this vision a reality in 2021.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Nov 2021
$300m
SERIES D
Dec 2018
$245m
SERIES C
Total funding: $774.3m
Company benefits
- Robust medical, dental, and vision insurance including 100% paid employee healthcare
- 100% of premiums for long term and short term disability and life insurance
- Mental healthcare on-demand by Spring Health
- Increasing paid time off with tenure, separate sick time accrual, five flex days per year to attend Niantic community events or volunteer
- Company-wide shutdown between Christmas and New Years
- 16 weeks of parental leave for parents, parental leave transition assistance by Cleo, Carrot fertility benefit
- 401k Match, equity options, compare and refinance loans with Credible’s online loan marketplace
- Cold breakfast, hot lunch and snacks all day, every day
- Cell-phone, gym, and internet reimbursements, pre-tax commuter benefits, employee discounts via Fond
- Employee donation match of up to $500 per year
- Wellness activities including yoga and meditation, volunteer off-sites, employee Resource Groups
Company values
- Start with a worthy goal
- Invite everyone on board
- Lead from the front
- Set waypoints, and then stay on course
- Speak the truth, to serve the mission
- See it through
- Weather storms
- Summit mountains
Company HQ
Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
John Hanke
(CEO)Having studied for an MBA at UCB, John worked as a Producer for 3DO before co-founding Big Network and Keyhole. He then spent over 11 years at Google as VP of Product, before leaving in October 2015 to found Niantic.
Phil Keslin
(CTO)Prior to Niantic, Phil was acontributor to StreetView, GMail and Lively products while at Google. Additionally Phil was a GPU Architect at NVIDIA and a key contributor to the design and development several of their GPUS.
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