Senior AI Engineer — Real-Time Location & LLM Systems

mapbox; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mapbox is seeking a senior software engineer to own the design and delivery of multi-component AI systems spanning Search, Places data, and Platform work. You will lead cross-team efforts to ensure high-quality, scalable AI capabilities that power real-time location services for customers and developers.

You will define product requirements, build evaluation pipelines, and balance ambitious technical goals with shipping practical improvements.

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 production with error budgets and on-call rotations.
• Data engineering depth: SQL and at least one distributed processing framework, handling pipelines where data quality matters.

Responsibilities

• Define how owned products should work; build measurement and evaluation systems for non-deterministic behavior.
• Run continuous evaluation of APIs, SDKs, data representations, and reference apps from end user perspective.
• Own MVP against a north star technical design and balance technical perfection with shipping value.
• Build data pipelines and tooling: ingestion, conflation, entity resolution, quality checks, batch and streaming jobs.
• Identify external datasets and benchmarks; decide when to adopt existing solutions or build anew.
• Design feedback loops and instrumentation to reproduce failures and turn recurring ones into evaluation cases.
• Define the boundary between model and tools; improve harness and state handling for model calls.
• Work to latency and cost targets per request, including caching and model routing.
• Create internal harnesses and tools (CLI, MCP) for rapid iteration; share reusable parts with teams.
• Lead code and design reviews to raise eval practice across the team.
• Contribute to solving open technical questions in this domain.
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure system availability 24/7.

Skills

LLM features

SQL

Distributed processing

Tool calling

Education

Bachelor's Degree in STEM

Tools

Distributed processing framework

Job description

Mapbox is seeking a senior software engineer to own the design and delivery of multi-component AI systems spanning Search, Places data, and Platform work. You will lead cross-team efforts to ensure high-quality, scalable AI capabilities that power real-time location services for customers and developers.

You will define product requirements, build evaluation pipelines, and balance ambitious technical goals with shipping practical improvements.