Software Development Engineer II, Search Box

About the role

This role focuses on owning the end to end lifecycle of Mapbox's search engine, specifically the POI Search & Relevance domain, where you will design and implement retrieval algorithms that power intelligent Maps search for drivers, couriers, and other location-aware users. You will take responsibility for making existing algorithms more efficient and highly performant while ensuring your designs deliver excellent accuracy and speed in near real time. Working closely with Search Data, Search Evaluation, and Search API teams, you will collaborate across international and cross functional boundaries to define and deliver high quality search experiences. You will write technical design documents, participate in rigorous design and code reviews, and promote a culture of operational excellence by monitoring systems and being available for on call support. If you are driven by solving hard search problems and applying cutting edge technologies to elevate relevance at scale, this position offers direct ownership over the tools that millions of developers and end users rely on every day.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Designing and implementing search retrieval algorithms across multiple search engines to improve precision and recall for location based queries.
• Making existing algorithms more efficient and or highly performant under real world production constraints and large scale data.
• Writing technical design documents and participating actively in design and code reviews to ensure robust and maintainable solutions.
• Owning the efficiency and accuracy of your designs, and being responsible for overseeing your own work through the development implementation lifecycle, ultimately delivering excellent end results.
• Collaborating with other engineers, product managers and teams internationally and cross functionally to align search solutions with evolving product needs.
• Promoting a culture of operational excellence by meticulously testing and monitoring our systems and codes to maintain high reliability.
• Being available and on call to support the health of our services, including participating in pager support for periodic on call duties, video calls, and other project requirements.
• Applying scientific experimentation and critical thinking to validate search quality, using data driven methods to iterate on relevance and user satisfaction.
• Leveraging modern programming languages such as JAVA, C++, or Rust to build scalable and high throughput search components.
• Partnering with Search Data and Search Evaluation teams to incorporate fresh signals, evaluate ranking changes, and iterate based on user behavior.
• Contributing to the overall Mapbox search ecosystem, including Query Understanding, POI recall, ranking, and whole page relevancy efforts.
• Ensuring solutions are cost efficient and scalable to keep up with the ever changing dynamics of the world in near real time fashion.
• Supporting production systems outside of standard business hours when necessary to address incidents and maintain service continuity.
• Implementing monitoring instrumentation and operational diagnostics to enable rapid detection and resolution of customer issues.
• Driving continuous product improvement by analyzing search logs, user feedback, and evaluation metrics to inform algorithmic enhancements.

Requirements

• Strong understanding of search techniques such as information retrieval and fundamental data structures and algorithms.
• Practical experience in making an algorithm perform efficiently upon implementation in a production environment.
• Ability to write sophisticated, highly performant, and reliable solutions that meet strict quality and latency targets.
• Excellent problem solving skills and analytical skills, valuing a scientific approach by using experimentation and critical thinking to drive and validate high quality solutions.
• Experience with at least one modern programming language such as JAVA, C++, or Rust.
• Proficiency in implementing monitoring instrumentation, operational diagnostics, resolving customer issues, and continuous product improvement.
• Fluent communication in English, with a sense for listening to others as well as getting your message across concisely.
• Conversational Japanese proficiency to effectively collaborate with local teams and stakeholders.
• Familiarity with the Japanese address system to ensure accurate interpretation of location data and requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience with maps, routing, and navigation concepts to better align search solutions with real world movement.
• Experience with NLP, machine learning, and generative AI techniques to enhance query understanding and relevance.
• Experience with search engines such as ElasticSearch, Solr, or Lucene to leverage existing patterns and best practices.
• Experience with solving challenging search problems at scale, including complex query parsing and disambiguation.
• Experience with big data and scale, data mining, and data science to extract insights from large datasets.

Practical notes

This role may require support outside of standard business hours, including pager support for periodic on call duties, video calls, or other project requirements.