Senior UX Designer - Map Visualisation

About the job

This is a fully remote job, open to people in Netherlands.

TomTom's map is seen by millions of people every day - in dashboards, on phones, and across partner products worldwide. As a Senior UX Designer on the Map Visualisation team, you will shape how our 2D and 3D geospatial data is designed, styled and delivered across TomTom's product portfolio.

You'll spend your days crafting multi-zoom map experiences, working with spatial data and collaborating closely with engineers and product managers to turn cartographic intent into production-ready map styles. You'll need to be as comfortable discussing label collision and style-layer specifications with engineers as you are refining colour palettes and visual hierarchy.

This is a product role first. You'll be embedded in a cross-functional team that ships map rendering, map styles and SDKs used by other TomTom products and by the customers who build on our platform. You'll take part in the whole development lifecycle, from discovery and solution design through pull requests to release. Your product judgement, and your ability to bring people with competing priorities to a clear decision, matter here as much as your cartographic craft.

AI is part of how we work. We expect you to use it to explore, prototype and ship faster, to know where it falls short, and to help shape map experiences in products where AI is part of the experience itself.

What You'll Do

• Design Compelling Map Experiences Create and refine 2D and 3D map visualisations from concept through production delivery. Own the end-to-end cartographic design process - from data exploration and sketching through to style implementation, QA and iteration across zoom levels, regions and use cases.

• Maintain and Evolve Core Map Styles Enhance TomTom's core map styles, ensuring consistency, readability and visual quality across platforms, screen densities and global markets. Balance aesthetic ambition with rendering performance and data constraints.

• Work as Part of the Product Team Work day-to-day alongside software engineers and product managers building TomTom's map data structures, renderers and SDKs. Take part in planning, refinement and reviews, provide design specifications engineers can act on, and review visual output during development and before release.

• Make and Own Trade-offs Help decide what ships, when and at what quality. Weigh visual fidelity against render budget, memory and frame rate on automotive and mobile hardware, customer requests against platform consistency, and scope against release dates. Reach a decision with the people who own the product, record it and see it through.

• Contribute to Renderer and Tooling Requirements Provide detailed input on the data and rendering capabilities needed to achieve design goals. Define requirements for internal cartographic authoring tools and identify workflow improvements that raise the team's output quality and speed.

• Bring AI into the Design Workflow Use AI to shorten the loop from idea to rendered map: generating and editing style-spec JSON, scripting data exploration, and building interactive prototypes on real data instead of static frames. Turn what works into shared workflows the team can reuse, and help define how we check AI-generated output for cartographic quality.

• Design for AI-Driven Map Experiences Contribute to how the map responds when the request comes from an AI system rather than a tap, for example in GeoAI answers, conversational search or agent-generated routes. Work out how the map shows what the AI found, how confident it is and when it is wrong.

• Inform Decisions with Research and Data Participate in user research, customer conversations and competitive benchmarking. Use insights to ground design decisions and advocate for improvements that address real user needs.

• Support the Design System and Standards Contribute to the Map Visualisation design system - documenting patterns, conventions and cartographic guidelines that enable consistency and scale across the product portfolio.

What You'll Need

Leadership & Product Team Experience

• A track record of shaping product direction from the design seat. You set out the options, make the case for one and bring engineering, product and business stakeholders with you.

• A track record of shipping software as a designer embedded in a product team, ideally on map, location or developer-platform products: SDKs, APIs, map styles or tooling that other teams and companies build on.

• A clear understanding of how products move from discovery to release and beyond, including planning, roadmaps and measuring results after launch. You know how versioned releases, deprecations and backwards compatibility shape design choices on a platform with external customers.

• Hands-on familiarity with how software gets built: backlogs, refinement, estimation, definition of done, Git, pull requests, code reviews, CI/CD, feature flags and release trains. You don't need to write production code, but you need to understand how your designs move through a rendering pipeline and into a release.

• Sound judgement under constraint. You can point to decisions where you gave something up to ship, and explain why it was right for the product and its users.

• Clarity with senior audiences. You can turn a complex design problem into a short, well-argued recommendation and own the result.

• Comfort with disagreement. You challenge a decision with evidence, accept the outcome when it goes the other way and keep the work moving.

• Experience contributing to solution design documents, technical specifications and cross-functional planning.

Cartography & Digital Map Making

• A solid foundation in digital cartography, GIS or geographic information design. If your map-making depth is still growing, show us how fast you are closing the gap, including how you use AI to learn.

• Experience designing multi-zoom digital maps with attention to cartographic conventions, label placement, generalisation and cultural adaptation.

• Working proficiency with key mapping technologies and ecosystems: MapLibre, Mapbox GL JS, OpenStreetMap data and tooling, QGIS, ArcGIS, Leaflet, OpenLayers or comparable platforms.

• Experience working with diverse spatial datasets - vector tiles, raster tiles, GeoJSON, shapefiles, point clouds or terrain data.

• Awareness of cartographic standards across regions and cultures, including sensitive topics such as disputed borders and local place names.

Map Visualisation & Rendering

• Demonstrated ability to build visually compelling 2D and 3D map experiences - from thematic styling and terrain visualisation to street-level detail.

• Hands-on experience designing 3D map content such as buildings, terrain, landmarks and lane-level road geometry, in stylised or realistic form. You understand how LOD, lighting, materials and camera pitch affect legibility and performance.

• Experience with 3D data formats and pipelines such as glTF and 3D Tiles, and how 3D assets are prepared and optimised for real-time map rendering.

• Good understanding of real-time rendering concepts as they apply to maps: style layers, zoom interpolation, data-driven styling, symbol rendering and performance considerations.

AI in Your Practice

• Evidence that AI has changed how you work. Be ready to show a real example, such as a map style, data visualisation or coded prototype built with AI, and tell us where it let you down.

• Sharp judgement of AI output. You can spot errors in generated work and know which decisions still need a designer's eye.

• Experience turning personal AI use into workflows the team shares, within the limits of confidential data and licensing.

Senior-Level Craft & Collaboration

• 5+ years of professional experience in UX, product or cartographic design, with most of that time spent inside software product teams.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Cartography, Geography, GIS, UX Design, Computer Science or a related field - or equivalent professional experience.