Senior / Staff Software Engineer, Mapping

About the role

Waabi, founded by AI visionary Raquel Urtasun, is the leader in Physical AI. With a world-class team, we're unlocking the next era of autonomous transportation with technology that's powering commercial autonomous trucks and robotaxis. Waabi is backed by and partners with world leaders in AI, automotive, logistics, and deep tech.

With offices in Toronto, San Francisco, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, Waabi is growing quickly and looking for diverse, innovative and collaborative candidates who want to impact the world in a positive way.

The Mapping team at Waabi develops the foundational spatial intelligence of our autonomous fleet. As a Senior or Staff Software Engineer on our Mapping team, you will act as a versatile, foundational builder for our highly scalable, AI-driven mapping infrastructure. We are looking for a strong software generalist who thrives on variety, can easily pivot across different projects, and tackles complex distributed systems problems from data ingestion to real-time serving.

You will collaborate and exchange ideas with our team, which includes world-renowned engineers and scientists specializing in robotics, deep learning, computer vision, and autonomous driving. We value original, high-impact ideas and rigorous experimental validation.

• You will...
• Act as a versatile engineering powerhouse, quickly ramping up on new domains and fluidly transitioning between backend pipelines, API design, and vehicle-side serving.
• Be part of a multidisciplinary team of Engineers and Research Scientists using AI-first approach to create high-definition (HD) maps at scale.
• Architect and build the engineering foundations of our long-term mapping infrastructure.
• Build robust, scalable pipelines to automatically create, validate, maintain, and visualize massive amounts of data.
• Design and develop comprehensive metrics, observability, and anomaly detection across various systems.
• Partner directly with downstream customers (e.g. Perception, Motion Planning, Simulation) to capture complex requirements and implement intuitive APIs.
• Engineer real-time, high-availability, and low-latency systems for fleet of self-driving vehicles.

Qualifications

• 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.

Bonus/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.