Software Development Engineer II, Search

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.

The Search Geocoding team is responsible for building the best location-based search engine that empowers customers that require an intelligent Maps search solutions to find places and points of interest as quickly and with fewer keystrokes as possible. We do this by developing groundbreaking algorithms and features, applying the latest cutting edge technologies, and creating cost efficient, scalable solutions that can keep up with the ever changing dynamics of the world in near real-time fashion.

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.

The Search Geocoding team has direct ownership of Mapbox’s geocoding search engine including Conflation, Query Understanding, document retrieval, and overall ranking. We work very closely with our partners, Search Data, Search Evaluation and Search API teams among others, to ensure that we provide the best solution for our customers at all times through cross-team collaboration and open communication.

We have a modern development process - analyzing our initial algorithms, implementing and experimenting as we go, adjusting and optimizing our solutions to ultimately provide the best user experience. We support a production system and, therefore, support outside of standard business hours may occasionally be required to assist with various team and system needs such as pager support for periodic on-call duties, video calls, or other project requirements.

Whatever the use case may be, our customers rely on us to provide the most relevant, location aware suggestions for any given query. As an algorithm/search engineer on the Search Geocoding team, your responsibilities may include (but are not limited to):

• Designing and implementing search retrieval algorithms across multiple search engines
• Making existing algorithms more efficient and/or highly performant
• Writing technical design documents and participating in design and code reviews
• Owning the efficiency and accuracy of your designs, as well as being responsible for overseeing your own work through the development and implementation lifecycle, ultimately delivering excellent end results
• Collaborating with other engineers, PMs and teams internationally and cross functionally to deliver a high quality experience to our customers
• Promoting a culture of operational excellence by meticulously testing and monitoring our systems and codes, and being available/on-call to support the health of our services

• Strong understanding of search techniques (such as information retrieval) and data structures
• Practical experience in making an algorithms perform efficiently upon implementation
• Ability to write sophisticated, highly performant, and reliable solutions
• Excellent problem solving skills and analytical skills, valuing a scientific approach by using experimentation and critical thinking to drive and validate high quality solutions
• Experience with modern programming languages (Java script, Python, Rust, Typescript)
• Proficiency with cloud services (preferably AWS) in implementing monitoring instrumentation, operational diagnostics, resolving customer issues, and continuous product improvement

• Experience with maps, routing, navigation
• Experience with NLP/ML/Generative AI
• Experience with search engines such as Elastic Search, Solr, Lucene
• Experience with solving challenging search problems
• Experience with big data and…