Software Development Engineer III, Search API (Places

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.

The Search Box team is responsible for building our premium geospatial search engine, seamlessly combining robust address geocoding with comprehensive Point of Interest (POI) retrieval for logistics, travel, automotive, and AI lab platforms. We do this by engineering sophisticated public APIs, continuously optimizing ranking algorithms, and scaling massive global datasets into high-performance search indexes. Additionally, we develop an advanced federation layer that dynamically integrates specialized third‑party services, such as live parking and EV charging data.

Our work acts as the critical foundation for holistic navigation systems, ensuring end-users receive reliable, precise, and highly relevant location data wherever their journeys take them.

As AI becomes embedded in modern engineering workflows, we value engineers who can thoughtfully integrate AI into design, development, and decision‑making. Our interview process will include discussion of how you use AI in your engineering workflow.

Joining us as a Staff Software Engineer on the Search Box team, you will play a critical role in designing, developing, and operating significant areas of our Search services, including our new Places API product.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Architect and advance robust services that optimize API performance, emphasizing excellence in deployment, system durability, and telemetry.

• Champion engineering excellence by instituting rigorous code quality standards and refining development workflows across the organization.

• Drive strategic decisions regarding our long—term technical architecture and scalability, participating in high‑level architectural discourse.

• Serve as a mentor and technical authority for the engineering team, cultivating a culture of continuous learning and professional growth.

• Drive design and development of services quality metrics and analytics.

• Run and design experiments to evaluate the quality, reliability, and capacity requirements of our user‑facing navigation products.

• Participate in end‑to‑end feature implementation within the Search Org; review code and design documents, shepherd feature releases, and participate in an on‑call rotation.

• Collaborate with business development teams to ensure that the product roadmap and design align with customer needs and market trends..

• Engage in direct communication with trend‑setting customers, automotive OEMs in EU, US, Japan, and China, as well as suppliers like automotive Tier 1 companies and Mapping firms.

• 7+ years of experience in engineering web services in either Rust or Typescript (Node.js).

• Experience building highly‑available API services within container‑based environments (e.g., Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, etc. on AWS).

• Proficiency in implementing monitoring instrumentation, triaging incidents, resolving customer issues, and continuous product improvement.

• Knowledge of operating systems and distributed systems (e.g., fault‑tolerance, consistency, service discovery, etc.).

• Proven ability to design long‑term technical strategies that balance immediate product delivery with the reduction of systemic technical debt across multiple departments.

• Extensive…