Senior AI Engineer - Real-Time Location AI

Mapbox; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 161,000 - 217,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid/Remote options

Comprehensive healthcare

Family leave policies

Fertility & family building support

Lifestyle spending account

Mental health support

Flexible PTO and holidays

Volunteer time off

Retirement plans with matching

Job summary

Mapbox is seeking a senior AI-focused engineer to own the design and delivery of multi‑component AI systems across our Search, Places, and Platform products. You will set MVPs, gate changes with regression data, and coordinate data pipelines while evaluating external models and benchmarks.

You’ll balance engineering rigor with shipping value. The role requires 5+ years in software engineering with ownership of services, pipelines, or SDKs, plus strong Python/TypeScript skills and experience with

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in STEM with 5+ years of software engineering ownership of services, pipelines, or SDKs.
• 2+ years shipping LLM-backed features to real users, in systems with error budgets and on-call rotations.
• Data engineering depth: SQL, distributed processing, and pipelines where a wrong record matters a lot.
• Fluency with tool calling and agent orchestration, including failure modes like stale context, hallucinated arguments, partial success.
• Strong Python or TypeScript, and ability to read code in caller languages.

Responsibilities

• Define how the products should work, build measurement frameworks, and gate changes by regression results.
• Run continuous evaluation of APIs, SDKs, and data representations from end-user perspective.
• Own MVP against a north-star technical design, balancing perfection with shipped increments.
• Build data pipelines and tooling: ingestion, conflation, entity resolution, quality checks, batch/streaming jobs.
• Track external datasets, models, and benchmarks; decide when to adopt existing solutions vs build anew.
• Design feedback loops so product usage yields data to improve it.
• Define the boundary between a model and the tools it calls, and keep it working.
• Aim for latency/cost targets per request with caching and model routing.
• Develop internal harnesses (CLI, MCP) and share reusable parts across teams.
• Raise the bar through code/design reviews and eval practice.

Skills

LLM features

SQL

Distributed processing

Data pipelines

Tool calling

Agent orchestration

Python

TypeScript

Evaluations design

Agent harness

Latency analysis

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Job description

Mapbox is seeking a senior AI-focused engineer to own the design and delivery of multi‑component AI systems across our Search, Places, and Platform products. You will set MVPs, gate changes with regression data, and coordinate data pipelines while evaluating external models and benchmarks.

You’ll balance engineering rigor with shipping value. The role requires 5+ years in software engineering with ownership of services, pipelines, or SDKs, plus strong Python/TypeScript skills and experience with