The Role
Own the navigation experience for 2-wheel riders, ensuring precise positioning, engaging UI, and reliable UX by collaborating with internal teams and external partners.
Summary Generated by Built In
Our Mission:
Driving technology always feels old. Not by a little bit. We believe vehicles can be a thousand times smarter, safer, and more connected to the world around us, and our mission is to see it happen. In 2019, we joined forces with Honda as their first startup acquisition, and now we’re expanding our vision into building the future of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) for millions of people around the world.
Why Drivemode:
Join Drivemode for an exciting startup environment and a vibrant culture that combines impactful work, competitive compensation, and excellent benefits. By becoming a part of our team, you'll contribute to a crucial mission that revolutionizes the way people engage with vehicles, addressing both business needs and the world's environmental challenges. This presents an exceptional opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation and drive Honda's success in the connected software.
About the Role:
You will own and create the end-to-end navigation experience for 2-wheel riders from scratch, shaping a product that is accurate, intuitive, and differentiated in the market. This includes collaborating closely with internal teams (engineering, R&D, design, QA, and product management) and external partners (Honda stakeholders, map data and service providers, positioning and navigation consultants, hardware suppliers). You will be responsible for ensuring our navigation product delivers precise positioning, a rider-friendly and engaging UI, and a fast, reliable UX. Beyond near-term feature delivery, you will also define and drive a clear long-term vision that sets our navigation product apart from competitors.
What you will do:
- Navigation & positioning expertise – Apply knowledge of map-matching, dead reckoning, GPS quality, IMU/sensor fusion, and map construction to guide product direction and evaluate solutions.
- Testing & validation – Design and oversee vehicle setups and data collection environments to assess positioning accuracy, reliability, and performance.
- Vendor & partner collaboration – Work with Honda stakeholders, map providers (e.g., ZDC, Mapbox), hardware vendors, and navigation consultants to resolve product issues and identify opportunities.
- Data pipelines – Partner with engineering to define ingestion and processing strategies using mass telemetry data to improve accuracy and reliability.
- Success metrics – Define KPIs for accuracy, latency, coverage, and UX reliability, ensuring analytics are in place to measure progress.
- Requirements & documentation – Translate technical needs into clear requirements, trade-offs, and decision artifacts for internal and external stakeholders.
- Roadmap ownership – Build and maintain at least a 1-year navigation roadmap that balances near-term delivery with long-term product vision.
- Stakeholder communication – Translate complex technical details into clear, non-technical language.
What we are looking for:
- 4+ years of Product Management, Business/System Analysis, Technical Leader roles with proven experience of launching and scaling complex, technical products from 0 to production.
- Deep technical knowledge on how software / hardware systems work - System architecture, APIs, databases, data handling, performance metrics, communication protocols, etc.
- Systems thinking and strategic mindset to make the right trade-off decisions and build a prioritized 1-year backlog and roadmap that align with broader product and business goals, with quantification of success through product metrics.
- Exceptional communication skills to translate technical details into non-technical terms and present evidence of product performance using data.
- Proven stakeholder management with cross-functional teams (engineering, QA, design) and external partners.
- Thrives in working in ambiguous and fast-changing environments, with strong capacity of breaking down high-level problem statements into clear actionable chunks of work, and logically sequence them into a plan.
- Automotive, mobility, or navigation industry experience is strongly preferred.
- This position requires full fluency in English - can be lowered if Japanese is fluent.
Nice to have:
- Experience in navigation, positioning, geospatial systems, or related technical domains (e.g., GPS, IMU, sensor fusion, map construction).
- Hands-on technical expertise in map-matching, dead reckoning, positioning quality, and navigation algorithms, with experience working with map/data providers (e.g., ZDC, Mapbox, HERE, TomTom, OpenStreetMap) and ability to engage vendors at a technical level.
- Experience collecting and using data to evaluate navigation performance, including setting up test environments or processes that generate the evidence needed to improve product accuracy and reliability.
- Business-level Japanese to communicate with Japanese stakeholders.
- Motorcycle license ownership is nice to have but not required - can be obtained after being hired.
- Working knowledge of Agile and iterative release process.
EEOC Statement: Drivemode is proud of a very diverse team with employees coming from 5 continents as of today. Diversity in our workplace has played an important part in our success; we recognize each employee’s unique background, knowledge, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints which are all critical in developing a product that has the greatest impacts on drivers all over the world. Drivemode provides equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other characteristics that make you unique.
Top Skills
Gps
Here
Imu
Map-Matching
Mapbox
Openstreetmap
Sensor Fusion
Tomtom
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The Company
What We Do
Drivemode enables smarter, safer, connected driving in any vehicle.
Drivemode was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs from Zipcar and Tesla Motors who set out to fundamentally change the way consumers use technology in the car. Drivemode offers a mobile-based connected car platform through a consumer-facing Android app, driver assistance and analytics for fleet managers, and a bring-your-own-device connected car solution for automakers. The Drivemode app transforms a user’s phone into a car’s central computing device allowing voice-to-text messaging, music player overlay on navigation, “Do Not Disturb” mode, message auto-reply, and personalized travel recommendations. The Drivemode app has an automotive-grade interface designed and developed to adhere to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety guidelines for driving apps. Drivemode has raised $9.2M from industry leaders. Learn more at https://drivemode.com or download Drivemode at bit.ly/getdrivemode.
