XR World Context Research Scientist

As an organization, Google maintains a portfolio of research projects driven by fundamental research, new product innovation, product contribution and infrastructure goals, while providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work. As a Research Scientist, you'll setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, our research scientists work on real-world problems that span the breadth of computer science, such as machine (and deep) learning, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more.

As a Research Scientist, you'll also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publishing your findings, with ideas inspired by internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world.

For decades, the computing revolution has reshaped our world driven by breakthroughs in compute, connectivity, mobile, and now, AI. Google's XR team is at the forefront of the next major leap – the convergence of AI and XR. This is more than just new devices – it's about reimagining how we interact with the world around us. We're building a future where lightweight XR devices like smart glasses and headsets pair with helpful AI to augment human intelligence, offering personalized, conversational, and contextually aware experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and deploy lightweight scene representations to capture world-facing context signals and enable spatial experiences such as contextual triggers or placement on XR devices.
• Interface representations with Gemini/Gemma variants. This unlocks powerful context-aware AI capabilities, such as voice-based spatial placement and on-device scene understanding for Spatial Gemini.
• Create and curate suitable ego-centric datasets, as well as the development and evaluation of different foundation models for building robust object- and scene-centric representations in real-time.

Minimum qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2 years of experience in software engineering.
• Experience in Python or C++ for prototyping and production-grade development.

Preferred qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Experience developing and optimizing on-device machine learning models for constrained hardware platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to bridge cutting-edge research concepts into functional, user-facing prototypes or products.
• Deep domain expertise in 3D computer vision, scene understanding and spatial perception.
• Proficiency in Python or C++ for rapid prototyping and production-grade development.