Brian "Bam" McClendon is the Chief Technology Officer at Niantic Spatial, where he leads the engineering development of the company’s groundbreaking Large Geospatial Model. Building on a legacy of innovation in mapping technologies, Brian is developing a new generation of geospatial maps to transform the way we understand and interact with the physical world.

He previously served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Niantic Labs, where he brought AR to life in popular mobile games like Pokémon GO, one of the most popular mobile games of all time with 100 million+ unique players each year.. Under his leadership, Niantic advanced its Visual Positioning System (VPS), built upon a  precise and detailed 3D map of the world. These innovations enabled developers to create immersive, cross-platform extended reality (XR) experiences that overlay digital content with the physical environment.

Brian brings nearly four decades of experience in computer graphics, mapping, computer vision and machine learning, and has made significant contributions to geospatial technology with 40 patents to his name.

He began his career at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), where he helped build 3D graphics supercomputers. In 2001, he co-founded Keyhole, Inc., where he served as Vice President of Engineering before the company was acquired by Google.

At Google, Brian spent the next decade leading the Geo engineering team, where he played a key role in the development and evolution of Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View, Local Search, and GroundTruth. Under his leadership, these tools helped map over 220 countries, capture more than 10 million miles of Street View imagery, and serve over 1 billion monthly users — with Google Earth covering more than 36 million square miles of satellite imagery.

After Google, Brian joined Uber as Vice President of Maps and Business Platform, where he continued to advance location-based technologies at global scale.

He serves as a research professor at the University of Kansas, his alma mater, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in electrical engineering from the university in 2015. In a fitting tribute to his roots, his childhood home at Meadowbrook Apartments in Lawrence, Kansas was set as the original default center point of Google Earth.