Software Development Engineer II, API

Mapbox is the leading real-time location platform for a new generation of location-aware businesses. Mapbox is the only platform that equips organizations with the full set of tools to power the navigation of people, packages, and vehicles everywhere. More than 4 million registered developers have chosen Mapbox because of the platform’s flexibility, security and privacy compliance. Organizations use Mapbox applications, data, SDKs and APIs to create customized and immersive experiences that delight their customers.

Mapbox is looking to hire motivated, curious, and innovative API Software Development Engineers (SDEs) for product teams in our Places and Navigation teams. These teams utilize a centralized hiring model where they combine their hiring efforts offering candidates the opportunity to choose which team to join.

• Navigation API: We develop and maintain the web services powering virtually all of Mapbox’s strategic navigation initiatives in consumer, automotive, and logistics. This is a highly multidisciplinary team, with work spanning distributed systems on AWS to geospatial localization, traffic telemetry, and mapping.
• Location AI: We are a new team of innovators forming at Mapbox. We’re building the spatial intelligence layer that connects AI applications to the real world with real-time, geospatial context. Our team designs the core systems that enable language models and agents to understand, reason about, and interact with the dynamic physical world. By fusing cutting-edge NLP, real-time data, and geospatial intelligence, we’re shaping how AI sees and responds to the world around us.

As a Software Development Engineer II on the Navigation and Location AI teams, you will be responsible for balancing rapid development of new navigation solutions against the reliability of our services as they scale into new request volumes, markets, and use cases. In a single week, you might write application code robust to a world’s worth of data, build and deploy microservices, diagnose complex system behavior as global markets drive traffic in unexpected ways, or facilitate continuous delivery at Mapbox. In this role, you can expect to:

• Collaborate with your team to identify and scope out well-defined tasks.
• Execute on the scope and be accountable for delivering on time with quality.
• Design systems and make decisions that will keep pace with the rapid growth of Mapbox’s customer base.
• Promote a culture of operational excellence by meticulously testing and monitoring our systems and code, writing documentation, and being on-call to support the health of our services.
• Reduce technical debt, share your knowledge, and invest in your teammates’ health and happiness, while optimizing application performance and accelerating feature velocity.
• Uphold a culture of collaboration, transparency, creativity, inclusion, and data-driven decisions.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role:

• 5+ years of experience building scalable high volume low latency backend services.
• Proficiency in our tech stack — Python, TypeScript (backend), AWS (CDK/ECS/Step Functions/Lambda/S3).
• Familiarity with code versioning tools, such as GitHub.
• Ability to engage, learn and contribute quickly to the initiatives.
• Able to perform independently all the development tasks, based on designs and specs.
• Self-starter who is communication and outcomes-oriented.
• An empirical analytical approach. You develop strong hypotheses, conduct spikes, and clearly communicate your findings.
• A desire to share your expertise through documentation, mentorship, pairing and both written and verbal discussion.
• A desire to work with individuals with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
• High quality mindset -- write unit tests, proactively remedy defects and follow through to production.

Nice to Have Traits for This Role:

• Experience and knowledge within the navigation domain.
• Experience with Amazon RDS.
• Experience with SQL.
• Experience with various security standards and associated technical knowledge.

What We Value:

In addition to our core values, which are not unique to this position and are necessary for Mapbox leaders: We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities. We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive health care, parental leave, flexibility for the things that come up in life, and innovating on how we think about supporting our people. We emphasize an environment of teaching and learning to equip employees with the tools needed to be successful in their function and the company. We strongly believe in the value of growing a diverse team and encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.