Principal Product Manager, Navigation

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.

What We Do

The Navigation team at Mapbox develops and operates web services powering virtually all of Mapbox’s strategic navigation initiatives in consumer, automotive, and logistics verticals. We are a highly multidisciplinary organization, with work spanning distributed systems on AWS to geospatial localization, traffic telemetry, and mapping.

Collectively we are revolutionizing in-car experiences with technology to build fast, industry-leading maps and navigation for any vehicle. We’ve launched products such as MapGPT, Mapbox for EV, and we’re enhancing the visual experience of in-vehicle navigation with 3D styling with our new Mapbox Standard through web and mobile SDKs. Mapbox has worked with automotive partners—including BMW, Toyota, and GM—to bring the best aspects of mobile app development into in-vehicle navigation and infotainment.

• Mapbox Blog: Introducing 3D Live Navigation
• Mapbox Blog: Route Notifications Improve Driver Safety
• Mapbox Newsroom: AI Features in New Navigation SDK
  
  

What You'll Do

As a Principal Technical Product Manager at Mapbox, you will partner with a passionate and innovative group of globally distributed engineers, external customers, and internal stakeholders like Sales, Product Marketing, Legal, Marketing, Finance, and Executive Leadership to make customers wildly successful in pursuit of outsized business growth. You'll work closely with your engineering teams and the broader organization to identify new use cases that solve customer pain points and drive revenue. By collaborating with cross-functional teams, you'll ensure product goals align with business objectives. As the go-to expert for your product, you'll handle internal and external inquiries, feedback, and requests.

In This Role, You Can Expect To

• Strategy and Vision: Define and execute a product roadmap that aligns with Mapbox’s overall business objectives by conducting analysis of industry trends and competitive landscape and identifying opportunities for innovation.
• Customer Empathy: Regularly engage our customers via video conversations, emails, and in person visits (15% travel) to understand their needs and pain points, as well as validate our proposed solutions.
• Algorithm Development: Identify areas for improvement, define & prioritize algorithm development initiatives aligned with business objectives and market trends.
• Data Analysis: Analyze large datasets to identify trends and opportunities for improvement. Leverage data-driven insights to inform product decisions and optimize algorithm performance.
• Organizational Collaboration: Partner with engineering leads to balance feature development with technical debt and scalability. Work closely with marketing, sales, and customer success teams to optimize go-to-market strategies, product messaging, and client support.
• Mentorship: Lead and mentor a team of Machine Learning Engineers, Software Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product Managers and drive innovation.
• Business Impact: Drive consumer adoption, engagement, and retention through innovative product solutions. You’ll own the pricing and packaging of your product as a standalone SKU (including sales enablement, marketing, customer trials, partnership opportunities).
  
  

What We Believe Are Important Traits For This Role

• 10+ years as a Product Manager: Extensive hands-on experience showcasing expertise and a strong track record in the field.
• Technical expertise: Our teams and customers are technical and value clinical analyses, critical thinking, and technical depth. You understand and can explain complex technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Data informed mindset: You believe in the value of data informed decision making and strive to measure things that are not straight forward but essential. You also have the right instincts to make speedy decisions in the absence of perfect & comprehensive data.
• Experience bringing products to market: You have a proven track record of shipping successful products. You have experience coordinating deadlines, setting pricing, developing a marketing strategy, and enabling support teams.
• Ownership & execution: Own the vision, lead the strategy, and guide the team to execute towards building the future of your product. Experience leading with empathy globally distributed product and engineering teams.
• Customer focus: You care deeply about your customers and their problems, and you work tirelessly to innovate on their behalf.
• Growth mindset: Have the humility to accept mistakes, learn and grow from them.
• Partnership: Experience collaborating across teams and domains including product, executives, design & key stakeholders to help drive key search decisions that influence the business.
• Strong written and vocal communication skills: You can talk and write about complex ideas concisely to a wide audience. You are able to lead and resolve company-wide technical discussions and are able to collaborate and include input from cross-functional teams (security, devops, data, compliance, and product).
• High standards for work: You drive a culture of quality on the teams you work with and know how to drive healthy tension between quality and velocity.
  
  

Valuable But Not Required Experience

• Prior experience in Search, Maps, and/or Navigation. While domain expertise is valuable, at our core, we are individuals who are technical, customer-focused, genuinely curious, adaptive, and eager to transform customer experiences from what they are today.
• Prior experience in delivering B2B APIs, SDKs, and/or iOS/Android App products.
• Advanced degree (Masters and/or PhD) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• Prior experience in software engineering, data engineering, or related technical field.
  
  

What We Value

In addition to our core values, which are not unique to this position and are necessary for Mapbox leaders:

• We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities.
• We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive health care, parental leave, flexibility for the things that come up in life, and innovating on how we think about supporting our people.
• We emphasize an environment of teaching and learning to equip employees with the tools needed to be successful in their function and the company.
• We strongly believe in the value of growing a diverse team and encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.
  
  

Our annual base compensation for this role ranges from $202,300 - $273,700 for most US locations and 5% to 10% higher for US locations with a higher cost of labor. Job level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that you agree to the Mapbox Privacy Policy which is linked here.

Mapbox participates in E-Verify to confirm employee work authorization. Please refer to the Notice of E-Verify Participation and Right to Work posters for more information.

We are committed to a fair and equitable hiring process. We do not discriminate against any protected class.