Jakob Engel - Director Of Research at Meta

Jakob Engel

Director Of Research at Meta

Seattle, Washington, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Jakob Engel is Director of Research at Meta Reality Labs, leading the Spatial AI team within Surreal to push egocentric 3D perception for contextual AI and future AR devices. With 13 years of experience bridging academic research and product-scale systems, he previously progressed through roles at Meta from Research Scientist to manager before taking his current leadership post. His PhD work at Technical University of Munich on dense visual SLAM, odometry, and quadrotor navigation underpins a pragmatic research style that emphasizes robust, cross-platform implementations. Jakob is an active open-source contributor to influential SLAM projects such as LSD-SLAM and Direct Sparse Odometry, with hands-on commits improving core data structures, performance, and multi-threading for real-world use. He combines system-level engineering rigor—seen in fixes for MacOS threading and international numeric formatting—with a product mindset focused on enabling live AR experiences (see Project Aria). Based in Seattle, he blends deep technical authorship with team leadership to translate cutting-edge perception research into deployable AR capabilities.

13 years of coding experience

6 years of employment as a software developer

Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at Technical University of Munich

Abitur, Abitur at Gymnasium Othmarschen

German, English, Spanish, French

Github Skills (22)

c-language10

multithreading10

eigen10

computer-vision10

cprogramming-language10

ros10

image-processing9

data-structure9

multiplatform9

camera-calibration9

cross-platform9

kalman-filter9

hyper-threading9

thread9

slam9

Programming languages (2)

C++C

Github contributions (5)

tum-vision/tum_ardrone

Nov 2012 - Nov 2014

Repository for the tum_ardrone ROS package, implementing autonomous flight with PTAM-based visual navigation for the Parrot AR.Drone.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Algorithm Specialist

Contributions:16 commits in 1 year 11 months

Contributions summary:Jakob primarily focused on modifying and enhancing the `PTAMWrapper.cpp` file within the `tum_ardrone` repository, likely contributing to the visual navigation system. Their commits indicate work on PTAM integration, including the addition of functionality for exporting point clouds and logging scale pairs. Additionally, the user made adjustments to the autopilot's behavior, fixing a bug related to yaw control.

ros

tum-vision/lsd_slam

Sep 2014 - Dec 2014

LSD-SLAM

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:39 commits, 14 comments, 8 issues in 2 months

Contributions summary:Jakob made several commits focused on core functionality within the LSD-SLAM core, particularly related to the `Frame` data structure. The commits show modifications to `Frame.cpp` involving memory management and data structures, likely to optimize performance. The user also worked on the `Undistorter` class, adjusting camera calibration and image resolution handling and integration within the main image processing pipeline. Other commits involve multi-threading and other minor code changes.

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