Sr. R&D Engineer (Location Team) - Indoor-Outdoor Positioning

Role Overview: Join Pointr’s Location team to enhance the positioning engine behind Pointr’s blue dot offering, used in airports, hospitals, and corporate campuses. This engine processes noisy real-world sensor data into reliable location estimates, both indoors and outdoors, running primarily on iOS and Android, with a shared C++ core supporting WebAssembly and backend services.

You will:

• Translate algorithm improvements from research into implementation, validation on real venue data, and release.
• Focus on probabilistic estimation, sensor fusion, and applied geometry, including native mobile scanning code for measurements.
• Join a small, senior team with ownership over technical decisions and a fast path from experiments to customer deployments.

What You'll Do:

• Improve the accuracy, responsiveness, and robustness of Pointr’s indoor-outdoor positioning algorithms across diverse venue types, devices, and real-world conditions.
• Research, develop, and evaluate positioning algorithms, including classical estimation and machine learning approaches, measuring improvements on real venue data.
• Investigate emerging positioning technologies, including development kits, reference hardware, and measurement setups for capabilities not yet available on shipping phones.
• Build and use offline replay, accuracy regression suites, and simulation tools to measure improvements. Validate on real iOS and Android devices, accounting for sensor behavior and runtime constraints.
• Develop production code in the shared C++ engine and native iOS and Android sensor and radio scanning layers, ensuring performance, memory use, thread safety, and test coverage.
• Turn field issues (e.g., suboptimal hardware deployments or unexpected sensor behavior) into reproducible test cases and engine improvements.
• Use AI coding agents daily for research and development, reviewing and validating their output.
• Shape technical decisions through experiments and code review, documenting reasoning and contributing invention disclosures where applicable.

What Success Looks Like:

• First 90 days: Independently run and interpret accuracy measurement tools, ship your first engine improvement with tests and on-device validation.
• 6 months: Own a significant area of the engine, deliver measurable positioning improvements, and diagnose field issues from customer venues.
• 12 months: Set technical direction and measurement standards for your area, with improvements deployed at customer scale. Help the team develop and validate algorithms more effectively through reviews and better tooling.

What We Seek:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including performance-sensitive production code. Depth in algorithms and estimation matters more than current programming language; prior C++ experience is preferred.
• Strong grounding in probabilistic state estimation and sensor fusion, including recursive Bayesian filtering and particle-based methods, with the judgment to choose an approach suited to the problem.
• Solid applied mathematics, including linear algebra, probability, numerical methods, and geometry. Ability to distinguish model limitations from data quality problems.
• Experience working with noisy, real-world sensor time series: reproducing issues from recorded traces, isolating causes, and validating changes with measurable results and automated tests.
• Daily use of AI coding agents and a basic understanding of how they work, including context windows, tool use, prompting, instruction files, and common failure modes. Ability to direct agents effectively and critically review their output.
• Working knowledge of iOS or Android development, enough to build and debug on real devices and modify native platform code.
• Comfort with native development tools, including build systems, Git, compilers, sanitizers, and profilers, and with cross-platform constraints.
• Clear technical communication with engineers and non-engineers, and a collaborative approach to technical disagreements and code review.
• Professional fluency in English, both written and spoken.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in indoor positioning, GNSS, robotics, SLAM, pedestrian dead reckoning, or RF signal processing.
• Hands-on experience with Claude Code or OpenAI Codex; other AI coding agents also qualify. Experience building agent tools or integrations is a plus.
• Experience with modern C++, Swift, or Kotlin, or shipping a shared native core in iOS and Android apps.
• Familiarity with mobile constraints that affect positioning, including background execution, sensor and radio scanning APIs, power budgets, and device differences.
• Knowledge of ranging and positioning methods used with radio technologies such as BLE, UWB, or Wi-Fi.
• Experience with computational geometry, geospatial data, or map processing. Wayfinding and graph algorithms are useful secondary skills.
• Experience applying machine learning to motion or signal models, with evidence that it improves on classical estimation methods.
• Experience building simulation or visualization tools for algorithm development.
• An MS or PhD in a relevant field, research publications, or equivalent demonstrated depth in positioning, estimation, or spatial algorithms.