Software Development Engineer II, Traffic

About the role

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. This role sits within the Navigation, Traffic team, where you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of the services that power traffic data and routing logic for Mapbox navigation products. You will design and implement the systems that collect, process, and distribute traffic telemetry to ensure accurate and reliable routing decisions. You will partner closely with data scientists, infrastructure engineers, and product managers to translate business requirements into robust backend services. You will be responsible for making architectural decisions that balance speed of delivery with long-term reliability and scalability. Across this work, you will apply creative problem-solving to optimize how location data flows through our platform.

Key facts

What you'll do

Collaborate with cross-functional partners to define, scope, and deliver well-defined tasks that advance the reliability and capabilities of the traffic platform.

Design and implement backend microservices that handle high-volume geospatial data while maintaining low latency and strict correctness requirements.

Write and maintain resilient application code that processes diverse and globally distributed data sources without degradation in performance.

Diagnose and resolve complex system behaviors by analyzing logs, metrics, and traces to identify root causes in production environments.

Instrument services with comprehensive monitoring and operational diagnostics to enable rapid response to customer issues and product improvements.

Facilitate and optimize continuous delivery pipelines to accelerate feature velocity while preserving system stability and rollback safety.

Reduce technical debt by refactoring critical paths, improving test coverage, and sharing knowledge through documentation and pair programming.

Promote a culture of operational excellence by writing tests, documenting behavior, and being available on-call to support the health of traffic services.

Champion data-driven decision making by developing strong hypotheses, conducting controlled experiments, and clearly communicating findings to stakeholders.

Invest in the growth of teammates by mentoring, pairing, and fostering an environment where diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes.

Uphold a culture of inclusion, transparency, and creativity by engaging with colleagues across teams and contributing to open discussions.

Apply an empirical analytical approach to performance optimization, capacity planning, and reliability improvements across the navigation stack.

Leverage modern programming languages and cloud-native patterns to build services that scale with Mapbox's expanding customer base.

Integrate AI-assisted tools and workflows into the development lifecycle to improve code quality, debugging, and system observability.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building scalable high volume low latency backend services in production environments.

Proficiency with modern programming languages such as Python, Rust, TypeScript, Java, Go, or C++ depending on service requirements.

Strong understanding of cloud services, preferably on AWS, including compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Experience implementing monitoring, instrumentation, and operational diagnostics to ensure service health and enable quick issue resolution.

Ability to perform independently all development tasks, from reading designs and specifications to delivering production-ready code.

Self-starter mindset with strong communication skills and an outcomes-oriented approach to achieving team and company goals.

Familiarity with code versioning tools such as GitHub and established branching and review workflows.

An empirical analytical approach to problem solving, including forming hypotheses, conducting spikes, and clearly documenting findings.

A commitment to high quality through writing unit tests, proactively remediating defects, and following through on production incidents to resolution.

Desire to work with individuals who bring diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to create better products.

Nice to have

Experience and knowledge within the navigation domain and how traffic data influences routing decisions.

Hands-on experience with Amazon ElastiCache for caching high-throughput geospatial data.

Practical experience with SQL for querying structured traffic and map data.

Background in Big Data and ML pipelines used to process traffic telemetry and improve prediction accuracy.

Exposure to security standards, compliance frameworks, and the technical implementation of security controls.

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in the Mapbox US office.

Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship for this role.

The annual base compensation for this role ranges from $160,650 - $217,350 for most US locations and may vary based on location, role, and candidate experience.

The interview process may include a discussion of how you use AI in your engineering workflow, reflecting Mapbox's focus on thoughtful integration of AI into design, development, and decision-making.