Developer, Routing and Compression
Routing & Compression
team
Montreal, QC
Full time
Bike to gym? Train to work? Walk to lunch? Bus to dinner? Life in the city is a multimodal road trip. As the newest member of Transitโs routing and compression team, youโll be the map-wielding oracle for millions of riders. Youโll help folks perfectly time their rides, tell them the best places to transfer, and whisper โyou actually can catch the earlier train, if you bikeshare to the station instead of walking.โ
But even oracles need to run tests, fix bugs, and hunt down edge cases. OpenStreetMap is incredible, but it ainโt perfect. The grids donโt always line up, a street zigs where it should zag, a Twitter user informs you about 6ยฝ Avenue in Midtown that can shave five minutes off your commute โ like a Mario Kart speedrun, but real life. And while youโd think transit routes would be straightforward to work with because they follow fixed shapes (except when they donโt ๐คช) the reality is more nuanced. Youโll help us diagnose suboptimal trip plans, figure out whether theyโre one-offs or symptoms of a larger issue, and make the necessary improvements.
Youโll also be responsible for reducing our appโs data footprint: other navigation apps are happy to devour your data, sending GTFS files in blimp-sized backpacks stuffed with extraneous information. At Transit we prefer the ultralight approach: we saw our toothbrush in half and cut the tags off our t-shirts to save weight on the trail. (How much transit data can you squeeze into a single kilobyte? The answer is โalways more!โ)