Staff UX Designer - Map Visualisation

Join TomTom’s User Experience Design team as a staff-level contributor shaping the visual direction of map rendering across 2D and 3D. You’ll help define and evolve map experiences that balance aesthetic quality, readability, technical feasibility, and performance across products, platforms, and global markets.

What You'll Do

• Define and evolve the long-term vision for TomTom's map rendering across 2D and 3D, from cartographic styling to photorealistic environments.
• Establish and maintain design principles that scale across product lines, platforms, and global markets.
• Work side-by-side with graphics and platform engineers to specify, develop, and validate new rendering capabilities in TomTom's Premium Map Display engine.
• Translate design intent into concrete renderer specifications, including lighting models, shader parameters, level-of-detail strategies, and style-layer behaviour.
• Participate actively in solution design reviews, pull requests, and sprint ceremonies.
• Take map experiences from early ideation through prototyping, implementation, and production delivery.
• Enhance and maintain TomTom's core map styles, balancing aesthetic quality, readability, and runtime performance.
• Shape product decisions and make complex trade-offs across visual fidelity, rendering performance, SDK compatibility, and data constraints.
• Influence the Map Visualisation roadmap in close collaboration with Product Management, Map Data, and Engineering leadership.
• Define requirements for internal cartographic design tooling and authoring pipelines.
• Identify gaps in the current workflow and advocate for tooling investments that improve design velocity and quality.
• Participate in user research, customer success conversations, and competitive analysis to ground visual and technical decisions in real-world needs.
• Translate customer feedback into actionable design and rendering improvements.

What You'll Need

Cartography and visual design

• Deep expertise in digital cartography, multi-zoom map design, and cartographic conventions across cultures and regions.
• Proven track record of building advanced, visually compelling 2D and 3D map experiences, from lane-level detail to global overviews.
• Extensive experience working with spatial datasets and geospatial data pipelines.

Real-time rendering and technical craft

• Strong understanding of real-time 3D rendering concepts: shaders, lighting, modeling, texturing, level-of-detail, post effects and runtime performance optimizations.
• Demonstrated ability to work within and influence a rendering technology stack; experience with mapping libraries such as MapLibre, Mapbox GL JS, and game engines such as Unity.
• Proficiency in handling a range of graphical styles, from photorealistic to stylised rendering of real-world environments.

Software development collaboration

• Significant experience working inside product engineering teams. You understand agile methodologies, CI/CD workflows, git, pull request reviews, branching strategies, and feature-flag rollouts.
• Ability to read and reason about code. Hands-on coding skills are a plus but not a prerequisite; what matters is that you can engage credibly with engineers on technical implementation details and architectural decisions.
• Fluency with solution design documents, technical specifications, and cross-functional RFC processes.

Staff-level leadership

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience in UX design, technical art, cartographic design, or a closely related discipline.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Cartography, Geography, GIS, Computer Science, UX Design, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated ability to drive alignment across engineering, product, and design without direct authority.
• Track record of influencing technical and product roadmaps at an organisational level.
• Strong documentation, storytelling, and presentation skills.

Mindset and working style

• Deep user empathy paired with pragmatic product thinking.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity in complex, multi-layered technology stacks.
• Collaborative and low ego. You build trust with engineers, PMs, marketeers, designers and customers.
• High attention to detail with a passion for craft at every zoom level.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on proficiency in front-end development (JavaScript, WebGL, etc).
• Experience in the automotive, fleet management, or logistics industries.
• Familiarity with consumer location-technology products and emerging trends in spatial computing, AR navigation, or digital twins.
• Experience defining or contributing to design systems at scale.

What we offer

• A competitive compensation package.
• Time and resources to grow and develop, including a personal development budget and paid leave for learning days, as well as paid access to e-learning resources such as O’Reilly and LinkedIn Learning.
• Time to support life outside of work, with enhanced parental leave plus paid leave to care for loved ones and volunteer in local communities.
• Work flexibility, with a mix of office and home working. TomTom’ers are asked to come to the office two days a week, with the remaining three days worked in either location.
• A home office setup budget and extra support with a monthly allowance.
• Options to work from your home country and abroad for a set number of days each year.
• A competitive holiday plan, plus an extra day off to celebrate your birthday.
• Annual events like Hackathon and DevDays to bring ideas to life with teammates from around the world.

Meet your team

We’re the User Experience Design team. Fueled by user insights and data analytics, our mission is to create powerful, easy-to-use products that delight our customers, from millions of drivers to automotive customers who embed our technologies in their vehicles. We deliver the design specifications for all TomTom’s products. Joining us, you'll be part of a team that brings together design disciplines from user research to interaction, concept and visual design. Together, we'll continue to develop a map that people trust all around the world.

About TomTom

You’ll help people find their way in the world by contributing to TomTom’s ambition to engineer a real-time map. You’ll work with a global team of curious and passionate problem-solvers building technologies for car manufacturers, enterprises and developers.