Senior Applied Research Engineer, 3D Computer Vision (USA)

DroneDeploy powers field teams with robotics and AI. As the only reality capture platform that combines robotic automation, AI agents, and a truly unified system, DroneDeploy allows critical industries to operate with speed and confidence.

From construction and energy to agriculture, the world’s largest companies use DroneDeploy to simplify field operations, improve safety, and make smarter decisions, faster. By combining aerial drones, 360 and fixed cameras, ground robots and proprietary AI, we’re bringing the power of automation and visual intelligence to all stakeholders, from the field to the boardroom.

At DroneDeploy, we thrive in a mostly remote-first culture rooted in innovation and impact. We’ve been recognized as a Best Place to Work in the SF Bay Area and named one of America’s Great Places to Work—but what truly sets us apart is the experience you gain: solving real-world challenges with cutting-edge technology, surrounded by teammates who are as passionate as they are supportive. Our team is bold, mission-driven, and building something that matters. We foster a culture where a variety of perspectives drive smart decisions, and where growth—both personal and professional—is part of the journey. Whether it’s flexible schedules, family-friendly benefits, or our strong track record of internal promotions, we invest in people as much as we do in product. If you’re looking to be part of something ambitious, authentic, and transformative, you’ll find your place at DroneDeploy.

Overview

We're hiring a Senior Applied Research Engineer to push the frontier of reality capture. You'll take modern 3D reconstruction approaches — gaussian splatting, foundation 3D models like MASt3R and VGGT, learned depth — beyond their academic comfort zone and into our production pipeline. The lever you'll have here is rare: one of the industry's largest datasets of real-world reality capture imagery, the scale to train and adapt models on it, and the engineering culture to ship the results to customers. This is an IC role focused on applied research that ships — designing, training, and deploying models that run in production, not writing papers.

We're a small, high-leverage team behind an industry-leading photogrammetry platform. Our customers have mapped over 150M acres across more than 180 countries — one of the largest real-world reality capture datasets anywhere — across industries as diverse as construction, agriculture, mining, conservation, forestry, and infrastructure inspection. That scale and diversity is the moat: it's where modern 3D models meet real conditions that academic benchmarks don't capture, and where the hard engineering happens.

What matters most is real experience with modern reality capture — you have hands-on depth in either gaussian splatting or foundation 3D reconstruction (MASt3R / VGGT-class), and you've built and shipped 3D reconstruction systems in industry settings, whether at scale in production or in a focused startup environment. Experience training or fine-tuning these models on real-world data is a strong plus — that's a meaningful part of the work here. The frontier of the field is moving fast, and this role exists because we want someone who can push our pipeline forward on the modern stack and turn academic models into production-grade reality capture.