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Mapbox is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to own the technical design and delivery of multi-component AI systems across their Location AI platform. This role is scoped by skill rather than product, spanning Search and Places data work, Location and Navigation Intelligence, and Platform work that enables AI agents to use Mapbox services.
You will define how products should work, build measurement frameworks and evaluation systems for non-deterministic AI behavior, and formulate hypotheses to validate product decisions. You'll run continuous evaluation of APIs, SDKs, data representations, and reference applications from end-user perspectives (developers, agents, consumers), identifying gaps and recommending fixes.
Key responsibilities include owning MVPs against agreed technical designs while balancing perfection against shipping useful increments; building data pipelines with ingestion, conflation, entity resolution, and quality checks; tracking and evaluating external datasets, models, and benchmarks; designing feedback loops so product usage generates improvement data; designing boundaries between models and their tool calls; optimizing for latency and cost targets; building internal tools (CLI, MCP) for team iteration; and raising the bar through code and design review. You'll participate in on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 system availability.
The role involves working across teams where expertise meets highest-priority problems, with expectation to move between teams and tech stacks as needed. Some technical questions in this space remain open, and you'll help answer them.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in STEM discipline and 5+ years of software engineering experience with production ownership of services, pipelines, or SDKs
- 2+ years shipping LLM-backed features to real users in systems with error budgets, on-call rotations, and customers who notice regressions
- Data engineering depth: SQL, at least one distributed processing framework, and pipeline experience where data quality matters more than speed
- Fluency with tool calling and agent orchestration, including failure modes (stale context, hallucinated arguments, silent partial success, unbounded loops)
- Strong Python or TypeScript; comfort reading code in any language
- Direct experience or deep understanding of designing evaluations for non-deterministic systems with ability to describe datasets built and failures caught
- Working knowledge of multiple agent harnesses with opinions on their weaknesses
- Experience diagnosing latency in distributed request paths
- Comfort with ambiguity and judgment to ship narrow solutions while general solutions remain unclear
NICE TO HAVE:
- Geospatial data experience (routing, geocoding, POI/address data, OpenStreetMap, conflation)
- Public API or SDK design experience for developers
- Experience building against MCP or similar tool transports
- Experience running evals in CI with commercial or custom harnesses
- 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 products through first external integrations
