---
title: 'Senior AI Engineer, Location AI at Mapbox'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-engineer-location-ai-mapbox-mapbox-88tpfcd9zvta'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-17'
---

# Senior AI Engineer, Location AI at Mapbox

- **Company:** [Mapbox](https://feeny.ai/companies/mapbox)
- **Location:** Mapbox, Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mapbox/cb999882-00a6-4b6e-9335-d1d6f183a452

## Job description

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.

## What you'll do

This role is scoped by skill rather than by product. The problems below span multiple departments and show up across our Search and Places data work, our Location and Navigation Intelligence work, and the Platform work that makes Mapbox usable by agents. You'll be hired into one specific team or product area, but you'll work across teams where your expertise meets the highest-priority AI problems. You should expect to move between teams and tech stacks as the work demands. At this level you own the technical design and delivery of a multi-component AI system, and you are accountable for the quality of what ships in your area.

In this role, you will:

- Define how the products you own should work, build a measurement framework for it, and build evaluation systems for non-deterministic behavior. Formulate hypotheses around the products we build and seek the signal needed to validate them. Define what a correct result is for a given input and state, determine whether to assemble datasets from real usage or hand-written cases, and gate changes on regression results.
- Run continuous evaluation of the products we build, whether APIs, SDKs, data representations, or reference applications, from the position of the end user, whether developer, agent, or consumer. Assess the gaps such as misuse of parameters or integration anti-patterns, recommend the fixes, and make sure they land.
- Own the MVP against an agreed north star technical design, and balance technical perfection against shipping useful increments.
- Build data pipelines and the tooling around them: ingestion, conflation, entity resolution, quality checks, and the batch and streaming jobs that keep a large dataset current.
- Track and pull external datasets, models, and benchmarks from published research and open-source releases. Evaluate what fits the problem and constraints , and decide when to adopt what exists versus build your own.
- Design feedback loops so that using a product generates data that improves it. Instrument systems so failures arrive with enough context to reproduce, then turn the recurring ones into evaluation cases.
- Design the boundary between a model and the tools it calls. Build or improve the model harness, decide what the model handles, what it delegates, and how to keep it working from the state it actually fetched.
- Work to a latency and cost target per request: streaming, partial results, caching, model routing, prompt structure.
- Build the internal harnesses and tools (CLI, MCP, and others) your team needs to iterate quickly, and share the parts that generalize with other teams.
- Raise the bar on your team through code and design review, and bring other engineers up on eval practice.
- Some of the technical questions in this area are still open. You will help answer them.
- Participate in an on-call rotation to ensure our systems remain available to customers 24/7. Team members alternate as the on-call primary responder, which may require immediate response outside normal working hours, including weekends.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role

- Required Education/Certification:
- Bachelors Degree in STEM discipline and 5+ years of software engineering experience, with production ownership of services, pipelines, or SDKs.
- Technical Skills & Tools (Must-Haves):
- 2+ years shipping LLM-backed features to real users, in systems that carried error budgets, on-call rotations, and customers who noticed regressions.
- Data engineering depth: SQL, at least one distributed processing framework, and experience with pipelines where a wrong record mattered more than a slow one.
- Fluency with tool calling and agent orchestration, including the failure modes: stale context, hallucinated arguments, silent partial success, unbounded loops.
- Strong Python or TypeScript, and comfort reading code in whatever language the caller happens to be written in.
- Core Competencies & Scope:
- Direct experience or deep understanding of designing evaluations for non-deterministic systems. You can describe a dataset you built and the failure it caught.
- Working knowledge of more than one agent harness, and opinions about where each of them is weak.
- Experience diagnosing latency in a distributed request path.
- Comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to ship something narrow that works while the general solution is still unclear.

## Nice to Have Traits for this Role

- Geospatial data experience: routing, geocoding, POI or address data, OpenStreetMap, or conflation of overlapping sources.
- Public API or SDK design experience, particularly for developers you never talk to.
- Experience building against MCP or similar tool transports.
- Experience running evals in CI, with a commercial harness or one you built.
- Automotive, in-vehicle infotainment, CarPlay, or Android Auto experience.
- Voice pipeline experience: streaming ASR, TTS, barge-in, endpointing, wake word.
- Work under constrained compute, offline, or intermittent connectivity.
- Experience operating a product through its first external integrations, where the customer finds the gaps before you do.

Employment Requirements

- Employment Type: Full-time
- Weekly Hours: 40 h per week
- Location/Hybrid Policy: Remote (from any city in Germany)

## What We Value

In addition to [our core values](https://www.mapbox.com/about/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.

## How we support you

- Hybrid/Remote Options: Enjoy flexibility to work comfortably from home or periodically from an office where applicable.
- Country-Specific Care & Coverage: Private health, dental, and income protection plans tailored to elevate your regional statutory benefits.
- Family-First Support: Family care, maternity and paternity leave policies to support your growing family.
- Lifestyle Spending Account: Contributions to support your health, wellness, and personal growth
- Balance & Brainpower: Mental health support for you and your dependents.
- Rest & Recharge: Paid time away, company holidays, and generous absence policies.
- Time Off to Give Back: Dedicated paid volunteering time in addition to your standard PTO.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that you have received the [Mapbox Non-US Privacy Notice](https://www.mapbox.com/legal/applicant-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. We are committed to a fair and equitable hiring process. We do not discriminate against any protected class.

#LI-Remote

## About Mapbox

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Mapbox is a global location platform that provides maps, navigation, search, and real-time location data services to power experiences for developers, enterprises, and consumers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Growth Stage)
- **Headquarters**: Washington, DC, USA (with offices in San Francisco, Helsinki, and Minsk)
- **Founded**: 2010
- **Founders**: Eric Gundersen, Mikel Maron, Alex Barth, Will White, Tom MacWright

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Location Technology / Geospatial Data / Developer Infrastructure
- Target customers: B2B and B2D (Developer-first) — serving logistics, delivery, automotive, retail, travel, manufacturing, and enterprise software companies
- Mission or purpose: To power navigation for people, packages, and vehicles everywhere. They equip innovators to keep up with a changing world through real-time data and map rendering technologies.

## Products & Services
- **Mapbox Maps**: A customizable, high-performance mapping platform offering a suite of APIs and SDKs for web and mobile applications, including vector tiles, static maps, and map design tools.
- **Mapbox Navigation**: Turn-by-turn navigation services for car, truck, and last-mile delivery, optimized for real-time traffic and routing.
- **Mapbox Search**: Geocoding and place search APIs that provide location intelligence and address autocomplete.
- **Mapbox Data**: A rich set of datasets including traffic data, points of interest (POI), and real-time location insights for analytics and planning.
- **Mapbox Unity SDK**: Tools for building immersive location-based experiences in games, AR/VR, and simulation.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company); Mapbox raised over $350M in equity funding. In 2020, its valuation was reported as approximately $1B.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — Over $370M raised from investors
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: SoftBank Vision Fund, Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, True Ventures, Glynn Capital, Atomico, and others. Strategic partners include the United Nations, World Bank, USAID, and Doctors Without Borders.
- **Growth Signals**: Headquartered in DC with offices in SF, Helsinki, and Minsk; serves millions of developers and enterprise customers globally; expanding into automotive, logistics, and IoT verticals. In October 2024, they launched new real-time data products for fleet management.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Developer-First Platform**: Serves a massive global developer community with a strong open-source ethos and extensive APIs/SDKs.
- **Customizability and Performance**: Unmatched ability for developers to style maps and control rendering, with low-latency vector tiles.
- **Real-Time Data Ecosystem**: Proprietary traffic, navigation, and location data that continuously updates, creating a data moat.
- **Strong Industry Partnerships**: Works with the UN, World Bank, and global enterprises, demonstrating trust and reliability beyond typical commercial use.

## Strategic Focus
- **Automotive & Logistics Growth**: Deepening integrations with automotive OEMs and delivery/logistics companies for real-time navigation and fleet management.
- **Real-Time Intelligence**: Expanding data products for real-time location analytics, traffic, and supply chain visibility.
- **Developer Ecosystem Expansion**: Investing in SDKs, Unity integrations, and developer tools to maintain community leadership.
- **Global Reach**: Scaling enterprise sales across non-US markets, especially Europe and Asia.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-First Culture**: Mapbox embraces work flexibility; most roles are remote-friendly, and employees are free to work from home, offices, or even a national park with good WiFi.
- **Comprehensive Benefits**: Offers competitive compensation, equity, generous PTO, company-wide breaks, retirement programs, and comprehensive healthcare/mental health support.
- **Family Support**: Paid maternity, paternity, adoption, and family care leave.
- **Social Impact**: Over 30 hours of paid volunteer time annually and a donation-matching benefit. The team works on projects with NGOs and social impact organizations.
- **Engineering-Driven**: A builder culture with a focus on innovation, data-driven decision-making, and cross-functional collaboration.
- **Diverse and Inclusive**: Committed to DEI, with employee resource groups and policies promoting equity and inclusion.
- **Open Positions**: As of mid-2025, there were 77 open roles across multiple locations, including remote and hybrid options in the US, Helsinki, and Minsk.

## Sources
1. [mapbox.com/company](https://www.mapbox.com/company)
2. [mapbox.com/careers](https://www.mapbox.com/careers)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/mapbox](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mapbox)
4. [mapbox.com/company/culture](https://www.mapbox.com/company/culture)
5. [crunchbase.com/organization/mapbox](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mapbox)

## Other roles at Mapbox

- [Software Development Engineer II, Nav Native](https://feeny.ai/job/software-development-engineer-ii-nav-native-mapbox-finland-d38xf9ynz4gs) — Finland
- [Senior Director, People Operations & Total Rewards](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-director-people-operations-total-rewards-mapbox-mapbox-8bk9x85eas1a) — Mapbox, United States
- [Senior AI Engineer, Location AI](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-engineer-location-ai-mapbox-mapbox-8rgyngghb571) — Mapbox, United Kingdom
- [Security Engineer II](https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-ii-mapbox-helsinki-kewryqtny0fn) — Helsinki, Finland
- [RAVE I, Map Quality & Insights](https://feeny.ai/job/rave-i-map-quality-insights-mapbox-minsk-1thwfx24y9qb) — Minsk, Belarus
- [RAVE I (24/7), Feedback and Corrections (Road Closures)](https://feeny.ai/job/rave-i-24-7-feedback-and-corrections-road-closures-mapbox-minsk-wt9dnn3hkw43) — Minsk, Belarus
- [Documentation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/documentation-engineer-mapbox-mapbox-086wgtmd0w42) — Mapbox, United States
- [Software Development Engineer II, Search](https://feeny.ai/job/software-development-engineer-ii-search-mapbox-mapbox-1xek5gxm8p5s) — Mapbox, United States
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