Cartographic Designer, Apple Maps

Summary

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.

Responsibilities

• Produce stunning, visionary artwork that sets the bar for cartographic design at Apple
• Design cohesive, graphic systems that represent the world across varying map scales
• Build 3D models of buildings, cities, and landscapes that represent the build and natural world
• Present work in design reviews and leadership reviews
• Work with engineering partners to turn proposals into production-ready work
• Build interactive prototypes that translate design direction into testable, at-scale experiences
• Create tools that increase efficiency across the design team
• Develop agentic workflows that expand the team’s design and technical capabilities

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