Cartographic Designer, Apple Maps

Apple Maps has become an essential way people navigate, discover, and understand the world around them. Our team is responsible for the look and feel of the maps that set the foundation for these experiences, combining cartography, graphic design and 3D world building. The work spans a wide range of disciplines, blending traditional design craft with emerging technology to produce beautiful, compelling maps that strike a balance of function and form.

Description

This role calls for an interdisciplinary design approach that moves fluidly between cartography, 3D modelling, prototyping, and emerging workflow technologies, built on a strong, foundational graphic design skillset with a confident command of colour, form, and typography. This includes designing complex graphic systems that represent the world at varying scales, as well as designing for multiple zoom levels, interaction, different map styles, focus states, and hardware platforms.

The work includes building and animating 3D representations of urban and natural environments, and also defining a vision of how we represent the world in three dimensions.

Prototyping and tooling are central to this role as well, such as the creation of functional prototypes and tools, and translating design direction into interactive, working prototypes to evaluate how ideas look and feel at scale. This requires ramping up quickly on internal technical systems to build prototypes using real data and code. This role also requires an ability to work with spatial data and data attributes, editing and processing data to support map design decisions, and creating tools that improve team-wide efficiency.

Communication and presentation are key parts of the role, including presenting work in design reviews, leadership reviews, and cross-functional meetings. This requires sharing work at any stage of completion, generating multiple design directions, weighing tradeoffs under imperfect conditions, and making decisions within real project scope and time constraints.

This role also involves developing agentic workflows that expand the team’s collective expertise and capabilities, applying emerging technology to support and accelerate design work.

Finally, this role requires navigating the tradeoffs between design goals, rendering performance, and data constraints, working in a dynamic, fast-paced environment that calls for sustained, focused effort alongside the ability to pivot quickly. It also requires comfort working with uncertainty, moving targets, and multiple projects at once.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in design, cartography, geography, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Professional experience designing for digital, interactive map products

Experience designing graphic systems using colour and typography for complex visual products

Experience working with geo-spatial and map data

Experience modelling, rendering, and animating 3D environments of the build and natural worlds

Ability to balance focused, independent work with fast-paced, collaborative work in ambiguous or shifting conditions

Ability to present work at varying stages of completion and incorporate feedback across multiple iterations

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing digital maps or similar data-driven visual products, including familiarity with raster and vector data formats

Experience modelling, rendering, and animating 3D environments or objects

Experience building or improving procedural modeling pipelines

Experience building interactive prototypes using real data and code within a technical organization

Experience building tools that improve a team’s workflow or efficiency

Experience developing or applying agentic or AI-assisted workflows to design or technical work

Ability to balance focused, independent work with fast-paced, collaborative work in ambiguous or shifting conditions

Ability to present work at varying stages of completion and incorporate feedback across multiple iterations