Cartography and Display Tools Engineer

Summary

We are looking for a Cartography & Display Tools Engineer to join Apple Maps. This role will empower you to build creative and innovative cartography and visualization solutions which will contribute to Apple's overall Maps and other ecosystems. Your work will directly shape how millions of users experience Maps across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Car Play.

As a Cartography & Display Tools Engineer on the Apple Maps team, you will build cartography pipeline, visualization tools, and authoring environments that leverage Apple's map rendering engine. Through partnerships with many other Apple teams along with Carto and Tools teams, your work will contribute to the next generation of Apple Maps and other Apple ecosystems.

• Build internal visualization and authoring tools that expose and extend Apple's map rendering engine capabilities
• Develop style editors, layer inspectors, and real-time preview tools for cartographers, designers, production teams, and marketing stakeholders
• Create tools for visual debugging, render state inspection, and shader visualization
• Enhance cartographic style compiler and optimize map data pipelines
• Prototype and validate new rendering capabilities in close partnership with the core Rendering Engine team, translating engine features into intuitive tool interfaces
• Expose rendering parameters — lighting, materials, LOD, and tile styling — through intuitive tool interfaces
• Engage regularly with cartographers, designers, and production teams to understand requests and gather feature requirements
• Translate diverse user needs into actionable technical specifications
• Champion tool adoption through documentation, training, and user advocacy
• Drive continuous improvement of tools based on user feedback and evolving creative workflows
• Build tooling for geospatial data ingestion, transformation, and tile generation
• Work with vector tiles, GeoJSON, and Protobuf formats
• Automate map content validation within CI/CD pipelines

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or GIS with 5 years of experience
• Strong proficiency in C++, Python, and Swift
• Experience with Metal, OpenGL, or Vulkan rendering APIs
• Experience building developer-facing or content creator tools
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills — ability to work across engineering, design, and production teams

• Familiarity with MSL shader development and GPU architecture
• Experience with Map Kit, Apple Maps, or similar mapping SDKs
• Understanding of cartographic principles and geospatial data formats
• Background in real-time 3D rendering or game engine tooling
• Knowledge of domain specific language (DSL), spatial data formats, SQLite, Bison/Lex parsers
• Experience translating complex rendering concepts into accessible tool interfaces for non-engineering users