We're crazy about maps in HiiKER. Topo, Satellite, LiDAR, you name it, we want it. We licence and publish detailed topographic mapping for countries and regions the big apps skip, and every one of those maps has to be found, licensed, reprojected, colour-matched, tiled, quality-checked and shipped small enough to work offline on a phone in a valley with no signal.
What you'll do
- Source new map data — national mapping agencies, open data portals, tourism boards, national parks and land managers — and work with us on the licensing and attribution terms that come with it.
- Process it into our tile pipeline: reprojection, mosaicking, colour and contrast matching across sheet boundaries, tiling, and generating derived products like hillshade and contours.
- Build and maintain repeatable pipelines with GDAL so that adding a region is a documented, re-runnable process rather than tribal knowledge.
- Quality-check the output seriously: registration against known control points, seam and artefact hunting, zoom-level coverage, and keeping an eye on tile size budgets, because every megabyte lands on someone's phone.
- Improve our elevation data — DEM sourcing and merging, void filling, and the contour and hillshade products we derive from it. This feeds the app's elevation profiles, 3D flyovers and printed maps.
- Work on the vector side too: OpenStreetMap extracts, conflating routes against our own trail geometry, and finding the gaps and breaks in trail data before our users do.
- Keep a clear record of every map we publish — where it came from, what licence it's under, how it was processed, and when it needs refreshing.
What we're looking for
- Strong, practical GDAL/OGR. You reach for gdalwarp, gdal_translate, gdalbuildvrt, gdaldem and ogr2ogr without looking them up, and you know what the flags actually do.
- Confident with both raster and vector data, and properly comfortable with projections and datums — you can explain why a map is sitting forty metres off and then fix it.
- Familiar with tiling and delivery formats: XYZ/TMS, MBTiles, PMTiles, Cloud-Optimised GeoTIFFs and Mapbox Vector Tiles.
- At home on the command line, and able to string tools together into a script that someone else can run next month.
- Careful about data licensing and attribution. Publishing someone's mapping on terms we don't hold is the one mistake in this role we can't undo.
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