Apple hiring heavily for Maps positions to improve navigation, Flyover and more

A search of Apple’s job site for positions relating to maps reveals 17 positions related to its Maps product, points out Adam Haworth on Twitter. The listings include engineering positions for Flyover, vectorizing mapping images, navigation and more.

The positions include Maps Operations project manager, Maps iOS software engineers, engineers for MapKit — Apple’s maps interface for third-party developers — and more.

One Maps Navigation position reveals that the team is looking for someone experienced in the following:

• Experience implementing routing algorithms such as Dijstra and A*
• Experience determining and/or presenting maneuvers in a turn-by-turn navigation system
• Familiarity with map matching from GPS and other location data
• Familiarity with map data formats from TomTom or other leading map providers
• Strong mathematical and computational geometry background
• Experience with the iOS SDK and Cocoa programming

It is interesting to note that none of the positions appear to be related to data collection and input, what most consider to be the weakest point of Apple’s Maps. Most of the listings were posted as recently as early September.

Apple has come under fire today for the relatively poor performance of its new Maps app, especially in comparison to the Google-based maps it replaced.  In our review of Apple’s Maps on iOS, we noted that it had a very long way to go if it wanted to compete with Google’s product, and it looks like Apple is hiring to do just that.