Founding Engineer, 3D Reconstruction & Spatial Intelligence

Drover Labs builds robots for inspection in hazardous, confined industrial environments. We are looking for a founding engineer to lead the software that turns what our robots capture into reliable spatial understanding and useful inspection records.

You will own the reconstruction and digital-twin pipeline, from calibration and sensor-data alignment through geometry, spatially registered findings, and comparison across inspections. Work directly with the founders and robotics team to shape the architecture, build the first customer-ready workflows, and establish how we measure quality.

The goal is more than a visually compelling model. Customers need to understand what was inspected, take trustworthy measurements, locate findings, and see what has changed. You will make those workflows reliable on difficult real-world data.

This is a software-focused role with close hardware collaboration. PCB design, mechanical CAD, and flight-controller development are not requirements. You are not expected to own flight autonomy or the entire web application.

• •Own the pipeline from camera and LiDAR captures to aligned, scaled 3D reconstructions and digital-twin outputs.
• •Build and improve camera calibration, sensor extrinsics, pose estimation, registration, and multi-view or multi-sensor reconstruction.
• •Handle difficult inspection data, including low texture, uneven lighting, occlusions, and imperfect sensor alignment.
• •Establish repeatable evaluations for geometric accuracy, scale consistency, coverage, robustness, and processing time.
• •Develop ways to anchor inspection findings to 3D locations and compare repeat captures over time.
• •Work with the product and robotics team on measurement, visualization, and inspection-report workflows.
• •Turn prototypes into maintainable, tested software with reproducible datasets, clear interfaces, and practical deployment tooling.

Core Skills:

• •Strong foundations in geometric computer vision, 3D reconstruction, mapping, or related spatial-computing systems.
• •Hands-on experience with calibration, coordinate frames, camera geometry, and registration or pose estimation.
• •Strong Python and C++ skills, with evidence of building and debugging substantial software.
• •Experience working with noisy real-world image, point-cloud, or multi-sensor datasets.
• •Ability to explain your personal contribution, evaluate output quality quantitatively, and diagnose failure cases.
• •Comfort owning an ambiguous engineering problem, making practical tradeoffs, and working closely with a small team.

Useful Experience (not all required):

• •Gaussian splatting, NeRFs, multi-view stereo, bundle adjustment, or geometry processing.
• •LiDAR-camera fusion, SLAM, or visual-inertial systems.
• •GPU programming, optimization, and deployment of reconstruction pipelines.
• •3D visualization, inspection analytics, change detection, or tools for measurements and spatial annotations.
• •Shipping a computer-vision or 3D product used outside a research demo.

Show us systems you have built and the decisions you owned. We value sound geometry, clear engineering judgment, and reliable customer output over a particular degree or a checklist of tools.

$100K/yr - $180K/yr + Equity (0.25% - 1.0%) + Benefits

Drover Labs cares deeply about your time. Project work and on-site interviews are compensated on a paid hourly basis. We want the foundations of our company to be in investing in what's most important — you.