We're crazy about maps in HiiKER. Topo, Satellite, LiDAR, you name it, we want it. We licence and publish detailed topographic mapping for countries and regions the big apps skip, and every one of those maps has to be found, licensed, reprojected, colour-matched, tiled, quality-checked and shipped small enough to work offline on a phone in a valley with no signal.
What you'll do
- Source new map data — national mapping agencies, open data portals, tourism boards, national parks and land managers — and work with us on the licensing and attribution terms that come with it.
- Process it into our tile pipeline: reprojection, mosaicking, colour and contrast matching across sheet boundaries, tiling, and generating derived products like hillshade and contours.
- Build and maintain repeatable pipelines with GDAL so that adding a region is a documented, re-runnable process rather than tribal knowledge.
- Quality-check the output seriously: registration against known control points, seam and artefact hunting, zoom-level coverage, and keeping an eye on tile size budgets, because every megabyte lands on someone's phone.
- Improve our elevation data — DEM sourcing and merging, void filling, and the contour and hillshade products we derive from it. This feeds the app's elevation profiles, 3D flyovers and printed maps.
- Work on the vector side too: OpenStreetMap extracts, conflating routes against our own trail geometry, and finding the gaps and breaks in trail data before our users do.
- Keep a clear record of every map we publish — where it came from, what licence it's under, how it was processed, and when it needs refreshing.
What we're looking for
- Strong, practical GDAL/OGR. You reach for gdalwarp, gdal_translate, gdalbuildvrt, gdaldem and ogr2ogr without looking them up, and you know what the flags actually do.
- Confident with both raster and vector data, and properly comfortable with projections and datums — you can explain why a map is sitting forty metres off and then fix it.
- Familiar with tiling and delivery formats: XYZ/TMS, MBTiles, PMTiles, Cloud-Optimised GeoTIFFs and Mapbox Vector Tiles.
- At home on the command line, and able to string tools together into a script that someone else can run next month.
- Careful about data licensing and attribution. Publishing someone's mapping on terms we don't hold is the one mistake in this role we can't undo.
Bonus points for
- Python for geospatial work — rasterio, GeoPandas, Shapely. Useful, but less essential than it used to be: if you know exactly what the output should look like, we're perfectly happy for you to lean on AI to write the script.
- PostGIS, and comfort writing spatial SQL against a large table.
- QGIS for inspection and one-off cartography.
- Tippecanoe, Planetiler or similar vector-tile build tooling.
- Experience working directly with a national mapping agency's data or licensing team.
- Any cartographic eye at all — knowing when a map is technically correct but ugly.
About HiiKER
HiiKER is a hiking app used by well over a million people to find trails, download offline maps and navigate everything from an afternoon loop to a thousand-kilometre thru-hike.
We're a remote team based across the UK and Ireland. The work you do shows up in the product within weeks, and nobody here has the luxury of only doing the parts of their job they enjoy.
What we offer
- Remote-first — work from wherever you're happiest, with occasional team meet-ups.
- A short path from "good idea" to "shipped" — no layers of sign-off.
- Real ownership of a channel or a system, not a slice of someone else's plan.
- Budget for the kit and tools you need to do the job properly.
- A free HiiKER PRO+ account for you, and a few to give away.
- Time and encouragement to actually get outdoors — it's the product, and we mean it.
How to apply
Use the form below. A CV plus a few honest sentences about why this role interests you goes a long way — we read every application ourselves, and we'd much rather see something specific than something polished.
We'll come back to you either way. The process is a short intro call, one practical conversation about the work itself, and a final chat with Pete and Paul, the founders.