Software Development Engineer III, Search API (Places)

About the role

Mapbox is the leading real-time location platform for a new generation of location-aware businesses. The Search Box team builds our premium geospatial search engine, combining robust address geocoding with comprehensive Point of Interest (POI) retrieval for logistics, travel, automotive, and AI lab platforms. We engineer sophisticated public APIs, optimize ranking algorithms, and scale massive global datasets into high-performance search indexes. We also develop an advanced federation layer that dynamically integrates specialized third-party services, such as live parking and EV charging data.

As AI becomes embedded in modern engineering workflows, we value engineers who can thoughtfully integrate AI into design, development, and decision-making. Our interview process will include discussion of how you use AI in your engineering workflow.

Responsibilities

• Architect and advance robust services that optimize API performance, emphasizing excellence in deployment, system durability, and telemetry.
• Champion engineering excellence by instituting rigorous code quality standards and refining development workflows across the organization.
• Drive strategic decisions regarding our long-term technical architecture and scalability, participating in high-level architectural discourse.
• Serve as a mentor and technical authority for the engineering team, cultivating a culture of continuous learning and professional growth.
• Drive design and development of services quality metrics and analytics.
• Run and design experiments to evaluate the quality, reliability, and capacity requirements of our user-facing navigation products.
• Participate in end-to-end feature implementation within the Search Org; review code and design documents, shepherd feature releases, and participate in an on-call rotation.
• Collaborate with business development teams to ensure that the product roadmap and design align with customer needs and market trends.
• Engage in direct communication with trend-setting customers, automotive OEMs in EU, US, Japan, and China, as well as suppliers like automotive Tier 1 companies and mapping firms.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in engineering web services in either Rust or Typescript (Node.js).
• Experience building highly-available API services within container-based environments (e.g., Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, etc. on AWS).
• Proficiency in implementing monitoring instrumentation, triaging incidents, resolving customer issues, and continuous product improvement.
• Knowledge of operating systems and distributed systems (e.g., fault-tolerance, consistency, service discovery, etc.).
• Proven ability to design long-term technical strategies that balance immediate product delivery with the reduction of systemic technical debt across multiple departments.
• Extensive experience driving high-visibility initiatives that improve engineering standards and operational excellence for cross-functional teams.
• Experience or interest in solving geo-spatial problems.
• Strong analytical thinking and the ability to justify technical decisions using system telemetry and data.
• Meticulous attention to detail and a creative, resourceful approach to problem-solving.
• Excellent communication skills, with a proven ability to collaborate effectively across cross-functional engineering, product, and data teams.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in the mapping, navigation, or automotive industry.
• Knowledge of machine learning techniques for geospatial data analysis.
• Contributions to open-source geospatial or data analysis projects.

What We Value

• High-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities.
• Individuals being their whole selves at work, supported through health care, parental leave, flexibility for life events, and innovative people-support strategies.
• An environment of teaching and learning to equip employees with the tools needed to succeed.
• A diverse team, encouraging people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.

Pay

Our annual base compensation for this role ranges from $194,650 - $263,350 for most US locations and 5% to 10% higher for US locations with a higher cost of labor. Job level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including individual qualifications, market demands, and specific work location.