Artem Pavlenko, the creator of Mapnik — the amazing map renderer at the heart of many open source mapping tools ranging from our map design studio TileMill to huge live updating datasets like OpenStreetMap — has joined the MapBox team. He comes on board after playing a critical role in the launch of MapQuest Open, which is based on open source Mapnik and OpenStreetMap data.

Artem is a incredible addition as we further grow the MapBox platform this year. Most recently he has been working with Dane porting TileMill to Windows.

Artem will continue to lead Mapnik’s core development — in fact his main work right now is focused on developing for Mapnik 3. All of this work will result in huge performance improvements for us, which will be critical as we build out our world base maps and further scale our platform. After years of coordinating together in the open source space, it is amazing to get to work together on the same team.