Niantic Posts New Job Openings After Pokemon Go Fest Disaster

Just a few short days after the debacle that was Pokemon Go Fest, Pokemon Go's owner, Niantic, has a couple of new job openings listed on their site, positions that have gotten some players wondering if there's any correlation to the event that made headlines in a way that no event would want.

A quick search through Niantic's job openings show that five new jobs have been posted today within the past couple of hours, something that would be innocent enough – and even would be a positive thing – if it weren't following so closely to this weekend's event. The jobs and their descriptions, seen below, deal with various aspects of mobile gaming and other software needs:

• Mobile Software Engineer (native development)
• Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
• Software Engineer (Computer Vision/SLAM)
• Researcher/Eng. (Computer Vision/SLAM)
• Unity Technical Artist

After deciphering the lingo of the job descriptions, quite a bit of the responsibility of the jobs that are listed here boil down to making sure the game runs well, especially on a larger scale. A massive amount of players showed up in Chicago during Pokemon Go Fest to attempt to catch as many Pokemon as they could in order to complete event challenges and unlock the Legendary Pokemon for players around the world, but many were met with issues that prevented them from doing what they came there to do. An authentication issue and a bug that was causing crashes were the two problems that Niantic was taking responsibility for during the event.

For those hungrily reading the job listings with thoughts about Niantic firing people in response to Pokemon Go Fest, it's important to keep in mind that this might just be a move to expand their team as opposed to cleaning house after the event.

All of these job openings could very well be efforts from Niantic to continue improving their game, especially since Pokemon Go Fest brought upon a wave of new and returning players thanks to the festival and the addition of Legendary Pokemon. Regardless of what the purpose behind the job openings may be, that hasn't stopped players from making the humorous connection to the recent event and letting their speculations run wild.

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