Senior or Staff Computer Vision Engineer

Hover • San Francisco, CA

17h • $188,000 - $322,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Hover is seeking a Senior or Staff Computer Vision Engineer to join their 3D Reconstruction platform team. This role is crucial for transforming real-world sensor data into accurate, structured, CAD-quality models at scale. The engineer will be responsible for turning cutting-edge research into scalable production capabilities and shaping the future of Hover's reconstruction systems. This position offers the opportunity to own technical work end-to-end, work in a fast-paced environment, and contribute to building accurate digital twin models of the real world. The role involves research, experimentation, and production, including reading papers, adapting academic approaches, training deep learning models, designing experiments, building proof-of-concepts, and developing robust engineered systems. For Staff-level candidates, this role requires technical leadership, comfort with 3D reconstruction, product strategy, architectural tradeoffs, experiment design, and production deployment. The Staff engineer will connect long-term technical vision with daily engineering execution and market needs to ensure the CV roadmap delivers maximum customer and business impact. The successful candidate will join a team of computer vision researchers, reconstruction engineers, graphics specialists, and 3D modelers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in computer vision, machine learning, or 3D reconstruction within academic research and/or industry environments, with deep domain expertise and a strong track record of solving complex technical problems.
• Hands-on experience with one or more areas of modern 3D vision and reconstruction, such as multi-view geometry, pose estimation, camera calibration, structure-from-motion, feature matching, dense reconstruction, structured 3D reconstruction, model fitting, optimization, scene understanding, semantic modeling, or structured 3D representation.
• Practical deep learning experience, ideally applied to 3D reconstruction, geometry, correspondence, pose, segmentation, semantic understanding, VLMs, or related spatial ML problems.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and/or C++.
• Ability to prototype quickly, train models, evaluate approaches rigorously, and translate promising research into practical systems.
• Experience designing experiments with clear metrics, baselines, datasets, evaluation plans, and go / no-go criteria.
• Ability to write clear project plans, technical specs, research summaries, experiment reports, and production-readiness documentation.
• A track record of technical ownership and the ability to independently drive projects from ambiguity through implementation and delivery.
• Strong collaboration skills and comfort working with researchers, engineers, 3D modelers, infrastructure teams, product partners, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong product and engineering judgment, with the ability to balance technical ambition, customer value, production constraints, scalability, reliability, timing, and business impact.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics, Graphics, or a related field.
• Experience building and shipping production CV, ML, or 3D reconstruction systems at scale (Staff level).
• Ability to define technical direction, architectural strategy, evaluation methodology, and quality/performance standards for complex CV or ML systems (Staff level).
• Proven ability to lead initiatives from early-stage research and experimentation through production deployment, monitoring, and long-term system ownership (Staff level).
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces, make pragmatic tradeoff decisions, and drive alignment across cross-functional stakeholders (Staff level).
• Strong communication and influence skills, including the ability to translate complex technical concepts, constraints, and tradeoffs for both technical and non-technical audiences (Staff level).
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar through architecture reviews, technical leadership, experimentation frameworks, and engineering best practices (Staff level).
• Track record of translating research, experimentation, or technical innovation into measurable product, customer, or business impact (Staff level).

Nice To Haves

• Research or industry experience in modern reconstruction and spatial AI approaches such as Gaussian Splatting, neural reconstruction, DUSt3R, MASt3R, VGGT, RoMa, surfels, volumetric methods, VLMs, or foundation-model-style approaches for 3D understanding.
• Publications or research contributions in relevant venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, 3DV, ISMAR, SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, or ICLR.
• Experience with large-scale production ML systems, including model serving, monitoring, MLOps, distributed training, scalable data pipelines, and cost/performance optimization.
• Familiarity with infrastructure and distributed systems tooling such as GCP, Kubernetes, Ray, or large-scale data processing frameworks.
• Experience with geometry processing, graphics, rendering, CAD/BIM workflows, mesh processing, or interactive 3D systems.
• Experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Practical experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools to accelerate research, prototyping, debugging, and production development.

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, evaluate, and productionize advanced computer vision and deep learning systems for 3D reconstruction, scene understanding, semantic modeling, and structured property representation.
• Work across the full lifecycle of applied research and engineering: identifying relevant academic and industry approaches, writing project plans and technical specs, building proof-of-concepts, training and evaluating models, analyzing reconstruction quality and performance, and integrating successful approaches into production systems.
• Partner closely with 3D reconstruction, Product, Design, Engineering, modeling, infrastructure, graphics, frontend, and backend teams to turn ambiguous technical and customer needs into clearly scoped experiments and production capabilities.
• Shape technical direction across larger initiatives (Staff level): framing problems, sizing opportunities, prioritizing technical investments, and making “stop / iterate / scale” judgments across reconstruction approaches, model development, data strategy, quality targets, and product impact.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs, resource needs, and roadmap implications to cross-functional partners and leadership (Staff level).
• Help raise the technical bar for the team by setting standards for performance, reliability, maintainability, and cost; leading by example in Python and/or C++; and mentoring engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, experiment plans, and production-readiness reviews.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a fast-growing company
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents
• Unlimited and flexible vacation policy
• Generous paid parental and new child bonding leave
• A day set aside each month to allow employees to recharge (Mandatory Self-Care Days)
• Recurring fitness classes, meditation/ mindfulness tools, virtual therapy, and family planning assistance (Remote Wellbeing Resources)
• Continued education support for management training, conferences, workshops, or certifications

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior