GIS Developer / Geospatial Product Engineer
Location: Fully remote, United States
Type: Full-time or contract
Company: onWater
About onWater
onWater is building the digital guide for life on the water.
We create mapping and intelligence products that help anglers, paddlers, boaters, and other water recreationists discover where to go, understand conditions, plan safer trips, and make better decisions on the water.
Our maps are not a background feature. Maps are the product. If they are wrong, slow, confusing, or hard to use, our users notice.
We are looking for a GIS Developer / Geospatial Product Engineer who can help us build accurate, performant, and beautiful map experiences across our products.
What you’ll do
You will help build, maintain, and improve the geospatial systems and map layers that power onWater.
This role includes a mix of:
- Building and improving map layers used by anglers, paddlers, and other water recreationists
- Working with geospatial datasets, tilesets, spatial databases, and map styling workflows
- Supporting map performance, data quality, and cross-platform consistency
- Helping publish and maintain production-ready map data
- Collaborating with product, design, and engineering on cartographic decisions
- Improving how users discover, understand, and interact with water-based recreation data
- Debugging map behavior across mobile and web experiences
- Helping create internal workflows for map QA, data validation, and publishing
What we’re looking for
You do not need a GIS degree. You do need to have built real map products, layers, tools, or pipelines.
Strong candidates will be able to:
- Work confidently with geospatial data and spatial databases
- Write practical spatial queries
- Understand projections, geometry, geography, spatial indexes, and data quality issues
- Build or maintain workflows that process and publish map data
- Work with Mapbox and its suite of tools
- Familiar with ArcGIS, QGIS, or similar mapping tools
- Understand how map styling choices affect usability, clarity, and performance
- Collaborate with product and design on map tradeoffs
- Move quickly in a startup environment
- Communicate clearly when data is messy, incomplete, or technically difficult
Nice to have
- Experience with consumer-facing map products
- Experience with mobile map implementation
- Experience with outdoor recreation, water, environmental, or access-related data
- Strong cartographic taste
- Experience with map performance optimization
- Experience creating QA workflows for geospatial data
- Comfort working across engineering, product, and design
Who succeeds here
You will likely do well in this role if you:
- Care deeply about maps as a user experience
- Like turning complex data into simple, useful product features
- Are comfortable working with imperfect real-world data
- Can balance accuracy, clarity, performance, and visual quality
- Want ownership instead of a narrow ticket queue
- Enjoy working in a fast-moving startup environment
What we care about
We care less about years of experience, degrees, or big-name companies.
We care more about whether you can build useful map experiences, reason through tradeoffs, and ship quality work.
Show us something you built.
How to apply
Email careers@onwaterapp.com with:
- A link to a map, layer, app, demo, portfolio piece, or geospatial project you built
- A few sentences explaining what was hard about it
- A brief note on whether you are interested in full-time, contract, or either