Senior / Staff Software Engineer, Mapping

Waabi Waabi · Robotics · San Francisco, CA +2 · Remote · Software Engineering

Senior/Staff Software Engineer on the Mapping team, responsible for building and maintaining the AI-driven mapping infrastructure for autonomous vehicles. This role involves developing scalable pipelines, designing APIs, and engineering real-time serving systems, with a focus on distributed systems and production-quality software.

What you'd actually do

  1. Act as a versatile engineering powerhouse, quickly ramping up on new domains and fluidly transitioning between backend pipelines, API design, and vehicle-side serving.
  2. Be part of a multidisciplinary team of Engineers and Research Scientists using AI-first approach to create high-definition (HD) maps at scale.
  3. Architect and build the engineering foundations of our long-term mapping infrastructure.
  4. Build robust, scalable pipelines to automatically create, validate, maintain, and visualize massive amounts of data.
  5. Design and develop comprehensive metrics, observability, and anomaly detection across various systems.

Skills

Required

  • BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Scientist, Electrical Engineering, or related field, with a minimum for 5 years of industry experience.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals with an aptitude and willingness to quickly learn domain-specific concepts like 3D geometry and spatial data structures.
  • Prove ability to work across various programming languages, seamlessly bridging high-level Python development with robust systems-level engineering in C++ or Rust.
  • Solid experience in designing, developing, and deploying production-quality, fault-tolerant software at scale (moving well beyond prototypes/proofs of concept).
  • Hands-on experience building distributed systems on modern cloud platforms.

Nice to have

  • A true generalist mindset: you enjoy wearing multiple hats, diving into unfamiliar codebases, and picking up new technologies as the mission dictates.
  • Prior experience with autonomous vehicles, HD mapping, or robotics.
  • Familiarity with 3D geometry, geospatial systems, spatial databases, and tooling such as QGIS, GDAL, or PostGIS.
  • Familiarity with Machine Learning pipelines or integrating AI models into production engineering systems.
  • Experience with large-scale data processing systems and orchestration framework (e.g., Apache Spark, Airflow, Ray, Kafka).
  • Open-minded and collaborative team player with strong willingness to help others.

What the JD emphasized

  • production-quality, fault-tolerant software at scale
  • integrating AI models into production engineering systems

Other signals

  • AI-first approach to create high-definition (HD) maps at scale
  • Engineer real-time, high-availability, and low-latency systems for fleet of self-driving vehicles
  • integrating AI models into production engineering systems