Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, Maps

Why is Radar the best place to work?

• We're trusted by some of the world's best companies, from high-growth startups to the Fortune 500.
• We have incredible scale: We're processing over 1 billion API calls per day from hundreds of millions of devices.
• We're well-resourced, and we've raised $85.5M from world-class investors, including Accel and Insight Partners.
• We have a high-performance culture, with ambitious and entrepreneurial teammates in every role.
• We recently moved into an amazing new office in Flatiron, Manhattan, NYC.
• We were recently named a top 10 best place to work in NYC by Crain's.

About the role:

We're looking for a Maps Product Engineer to strengthen the data foundation behind Radar's geocoding platform. Our daily traffic is over 1 Billion API calls / day (15,000 requests / second) so you will be operating at scale. You'll own the systems that bring many sources of location data together into something reliable, accurate, and fresh, with the opportunity to bring AI into how we enrich and scale it. It's a broad role with deep ownership of the data layer, reaching across the geocoding stack from ingestion to serving. This role will be in our NYC HQ.

How we work:

We care a lot about shipping fast and talking to customers. We're committed to our product vision of full-stack location infrastructure, but we also know that customer feedback is a treasure map to gold. Even though Slack is the brain of our company, working together in-person in our NYC HQ is the fastest way for us to get things done. We meet on Mondays to plan out work for the week in small groups and use Linear for planning.

The stack:

Our core backend service is HorizonDB, a geospatial database written in Rust that powers geocoding (see our blog posts here and here for a look at the internals)

We use Tantivy, RocksDB, and FSTs for indexing, with ML models for query understanding and ranking.

Our geospatial data pipelines are written in Scala and Python on Airflow, bringing many commercial and open data sources together.

The API layer is a Node.js TypeScript app, and we use MongoDB, S3/Athena, and Redis.

Everything is deployed to AWS via Kubernetes on EKS using Terraform.

Most engineers are in the on-call rotation.

We sponsor OpenStreetMaps, MapLibre, and OpenAddresses.

What you’ll do:

• Own the data foundation under the geocoder including how location data is modeled, kept consistent, and served reliably, working across Scala, Python, and Rust
• Build the pipelines that bring many commercial and open data sources together, expanding coverage and quality across US and international data
• Help bring LLMs and agents into the data layer for enrichment, labeling, and quality, with the guardrails to keep them trustworthy
• Range across the geocoding stack when the work calls for it, from the serving path in HorizonDB to the Node.js/TypeScript API
• Have your work power over 1 Billion API calls / day
• Talk to Radar customers and prospects, hear their feedback, incorporate it into your work and make them successful

You should:

• Think of yourself as a generalist engineer first, not tied to any particular stack
• Are interested in talking to customers or prospects and making them successful
• Are deeply curious about how things work, and have the tenacity to sit with hard problems and power through them

Bonus points if you:

• Are a former technical co-founder
• Have worked on a high throughput, high growth SaaS application
• Have worked on geospatial infrastructure
• Have built large-scale data pipelines or data-integration systems
• Have used LLMs in a data or ML pipeline (enrichment, labeling, or evaluation)

You’ll work with:

• Tim Julien, CTO
• Rishant Dwivedi, Engineering Manager
• Our customers and prospects
• Our Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Sales teams

What we offer:

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful stock options in a fast-growing company
• 401(k) plan with 4% match
• New HQ in Flatiron, NYC
• Top-notch equipment
• Catered lunches
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, dental, and vision insurance with 100% coverage for employees
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Commuter and fitness benefits

Radar is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.