Research Scientist, Extended Reality, Hand Tracking

Minimum qualifications:

• PhD degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  
• One or more scientific publication submission(s) for conferences, journals, or public repositories (such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 2 years of experience with coding.
• 2 years of experience with machine learning algorithms and tools (e.g., TensorFlow), artificial intelligence, or deep learning.
• 1 year of experience owning and initiating research agendas.
  
• Experience with object detection, object tracking, or 3D vision.

About the job

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.

As a Research Scientist on the Extended Reality (XR) Hand Tracking team, you will build the next generation of ground-truth data infrastructure to power immersive human-computer interaction. You will research and develop advanced 3D hand capture systems, delivering the comprehensive data needed to enable real-time hand tracking on Google’s future XR devices.

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 pair with helpful AI to augment human intelligence, offering personalized, conversational, and contextually aware experiences.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $141,000-$202,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable, automated pipelines to process multi-view capture data, ensuring efficient handling of 3D assets from raw capture to model training.
• Research and develop algorithms for 3D hand reconstruction, ML landmark detection, and parametric model registration to create high-fidelity ground truth hand data.
  
• Work with the team to leverage the captured data to improve the accuracy of XR hand tracking models for challenging scenarios like occlusion and hand object interaction.