Senior Software Engineer, Search

Job Description

Who We Are

Mapbox is all about precise location data and powerful developer tools to change the way we navigate the world. Our services are at the heart of our customers' businesses, be it BMW, Porsche, Toyota/Lexus, Rivian, GM, DPD, Doordash, Instacart, The Weather Channel, Strava or in total more than two million developers worldwide serving over 600 million users monthly. We provide powerful routing engines, accurate, traffic-powered travel times, and intuitive turn-by-turn directions to help our customers build engaging navigation experiences. We give designers control over everything from colors and fonts, to 3D features and camera angles, to the pitch of the map as a car enters a turn. Our APIs, SDKs, and live updating map data give developers tools to build better mapping, navigation, and search experiences across platforms.

What We Do

Search has a lot of challenging areas for engineers to explore and grow. Moreover, Mapbox search is about location and it can be highly adjustable to the end-user use cases, like navigation routable points, along the route search, limited connectivity search, etc. We focus our efforts on relevance, geo-context optimisations, data conflation, merging offline and online solutions and measuring all of that with high-volume user feedback. Search is the key component of our solutions. Every route and every delivery starts with a search.

Get familiar with our search service first-hand: https://www.mapbox.com/search-service

Or do the searching in the playground and find room for improvement: https://docs.mapbox.com/playground/geocoding/

What You’ll Do

Search interacts with many internal systems at Mapbox, making this a high-visibility team with great opportunities to collaborate across the company. As a Senior Engineer, you'll be responsible for designing, developing, and operating significant areas of our search services. The problem space is an interesting mix of geospatial data, data analysis, search algorithms, performance, and infrastructure challenges. Search is a critical component to our customers’ applications, and a major partner to the Maps and Navigation organizations at Mapbox.

In this role, you can expect to:

• Write algorithms in C++ and Rust to build the best location search on the market, grow you search-specific knowledge and tech stack;
• Be on the cutting edge of a brand new search engine with the infinite ability to experiment and improve without being held back by the old ways;
• Design and implement scalable services for our API and search engines, following and establishing best practices for deployment, resilience, and observability;
• Participate in end-to-end feature implementation within the larger search organization; review code and design documents, shepherd feature releases, and participate in an on-call rotation;
• Evaluate the quality, reliability, and capacity requirements of our user-facing search products and become a well-rounded owner of what you deliver;
• Work with product owners, sales engineering, and management to drive future product direction.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role

• 4+ years experience engineering web services in at least one backend language, e.g., Node.js, Rust, C++, Go, or Java;
• Experience building highly-available API services within container-based environments (e.g., Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, etc. on AWS);
• Knowing algorithms and data structures, experimenting with service improvements based on data analysis and performance profiling;
• Proficiency implementing monitoring instrumentation, operational diagnostics, resolving customer issues, and continuous product improvement;
• Knowledge of operating systems and distributed systems (e.g., fault-tolerance, consistency, service discovery, etc.);
• Experience and interest in solving challenging search-domain problems;
• Enthusiasm for learning and knowledge sharing in a multidisciplinary environment, supported by mentorship experience and strong written and verbal communication skills in English;
• A desire to work with individuals with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

What Would be a Huge Advantage to Have

• Experience working with big data, data pipelines, caching and technologies such as ElasticSearch and Redis;
• Proficiency in C++ with experience and fair knowledge of the language specification, C++14/17 standard is appreciated;
• Strong knowledge of the standard libraries;
• System architecture experience and understanding of architectural concepts.

What We Value

In addition to our core values , which are not unique to this position and are necessary for all Mapbox leaders:

• We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities and own what they do.
• We emphasize a partnership of teaching and learning to equip employees with a psychologically safe environment and tools needed to be successful in their function and growth.
• We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive leadership, flexibility for the things that come up in life, and innovating on how we think about supporting our people.
• We strongly believe in the value of a diverse team and encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that you have received the Mapbox Non-US Privacy Notice for applicants, which is linked here . Completing this application requires you to provide personal data, such as your name and contact information, which is mandatory for Mapbox to process your application.

Mapbox is an EEO Employer - Minority/Female/Veteran/Disabled/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity

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