Principal Software Development Engineer, Navigation SDK

Mapbox is the leading real-time location platform for a new generation of location-aware businesses. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the technical excellence and innovation for the Navigation organization, shaping the future of the Navigation product portfolio and driving the development of secure, frictionless experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Develop the Roadmap: Set and guide the long-term technical direction and roadmap for the Navigation organization, aligning with Mapbox’s business objectives while driving innovation
• Shape the Vision: Lead and mentor a global team of 100+ engineers through the design, development, and execution of critical engineering components to shape the vision for exceptional customer experience
• Promote Collaboration: Collaborate across teams to uncover and align complex technical requirements, evaluate design trade-offs, and influence product direction
• Proactively Innovate: Evaluate, prototype, and roll out new technologies/frameworks to cultivate a culture of innovation that supports and scales for the company’s expansion into new markets
• Advocate for Customers: Engage directly with customers to understand their needs, travel as needed to meet with them, discuss ideas and solutions, and effectively relay insights back to the team

Requirements:

• 15+ years of engineering experience: Extensive hands-on experience showcasing expertise and a strong track record in the field
• Strong distributed systems and infrastructure understanding: Ability to design, build, and lead engineers in the building of distributed systems, low-latency pipelines, and large-scale data processing, to name a few
• SDK development: Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining software development kits across platforms(e.g., iOS, Android, Web, or embedded systems), with a focus on developer experience, usability, and performance
• Technical domain knowledge: Extensive experience coding in many languages such as C/C++, Python, Javascript, Typescript, Go. Deep knowledge of different design patterns, memory management, multithreading, and performance optimization for high-efficiency applications
• Mobile development: Experience building mobile applications (iOS and/or Android) with a focus on SDK integration and development, using languages such as Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin, or Java
• Cloud proficiency: Extensive experience with cloud database services, including AWS RDS, Google Cloud Spanner, and Azure SQL, as well as deploying and managing databases in cloud environments
• Operational excellence: You drive a culture of quality and continuous improvement in your organization. Strong passion for clean code and robust architecture, with a drive to elevate engineering practices and design standards across the team
• Ownership & execution: Own the technical vision, lead the strategy and guide the team to execute towards building the future of Navigation. Experience leading with empathy globally distributed engineering teams
• Customer focus: You care deeply about your customers and their problems, and you work tirelessly to innovate on their behalf
• Growth mindset: Have the humility to accept mistakes, learn and grow from them
• Partnership: Experience collaborating across teams and domains including product, executives, design & key stakeholders to help drive key search decisions that influence the business
• Strong written and vocal communication skills: You can talk and write about complex ideas concisely to a wide audience. You are able to lead and resolve company-wide technical discussions and are able to collaborate and include input from cross-functional teams (security, devops, data, compliance and product)
• Data informed mindset: You believe in the value of data informed decision making and strive to measure things that are not straight forward but essential. You also have the right instincts to make speedy decisions in the absence of perfect & comprehensive data
• Experience bringing products to market: You have a proven track record of shipping successful products. You have experience coordinating deadlines, setting pricing, developing a marketing strategy, and enabling support teams
• High standards for work: You drive a culture of quality on the teams you work with and know how to drive healthy tension between quality and velocity
• Prior experience in Maps and/or Navigation. While domain expertise is valuable, at our core, we are individuals who are technical, customer-focused, genuinely curious, adaptive, and eager to transform customer experiences from what they are today
• Advanced degree (Masters and/or PhD) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field