Staff Software Engineer

Job description

Hi, we’re The Browser Company 👋 and we’re building a better way to use the internet.

Browsers are unique in that they are one of the only pieces of software that you share with your parents as well as your kids. Which makes sense, they’re our doorway to the most important things — through them we socialize with loved ones, work on our passion projects, and explore our curiosities. But on their own, they don’t actually do a whole lot, they’re kind of just there. They don’t help us organize our messy lives or make it easier to compose our ideas. We believe that the browser could do so much more — it can empower and support the amazing things we do on the internet. That’s why we’re building one: a browser that can help us grow, create, and stay curious.

To accomplish this lofty task, we’re building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds and experiences. This isn’t optional, it’s crucial to our mission, as we need a wide range of perspectives to challenge our assumptions and shape our browser through a bold, creative lens. With that in mind, we especially encourage women, people of color, and others from historically marginalized groups to apply.

About The Role

The Browser Company has taken a unique approach to building Arc, our Swift/Chromium web browser, on multiple platforms. While most major browsers are written in C++, we decided to avoid challenges around slow iteration speed and memory safety by building Arc using Swift. A small team of language compiler and systems engineers, led by Saleem Abdulrasool, have implemented the protocol that enables us to run our Swift code across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

As a Software Engineer, Systems on the Compiler Team, you’ll focus on improving the Swift compiler and toolchain to enable our team to build for Windows. Your work will directly contribute to our efforts to redefine how browsers and cross-platform applications are built, leveraging Swift as a core part of our technology stack.

Overall you will…

• Spearhead technical projects for existing and new features across the Swift compiler, toolchain, SDK and frameworks for Windows.

• Port existing frameworks to Windows and fix Windows-specific bugs and tests.

• Monitor builds, investigating and fixing causes of failures in our Swift CI system.

• Maintain and improve support for platforms under development and ones that are currently unsupported (Windows ARM64, Android, etc).

• Build a macOS toolchain via GHA that we can use as an alternative toolchain in Xcode.

• Give back to the open source community. We believe in upstreaming our work to benefit the community that we benefit greatly from.

After 1 month you will…

• Get onboarded onto the team and codebase with an onboarding buddy.

• Attend a number of onboarding presentations on our product journey, the phases a startup goes through, our technical strategy, and more.

• Get familiar with Swift, our Chromium architecture, build tooling, and client-side infrastructure.

• Have shipped a few bug fixes and features across our codebase.

After 3 months you will…

• Be familiar with our Swift architecture and contribute to ideas that will make our engineers’ lives easier when prototyping and building new features.

• Shipped a few tickets to improve infrastructure pieces like our AI product infrastructure, deployment systems, release process, or feature flags infrastructure.

• Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, code reviews, code style, and more.

• Be involved in infrastructure discussions like how we add better observability to debug issues in production, how we better monitor performance regressions, or how we make our updater less finicky.

• Be regularly posting feedback about using the browser in our #dogfooding channel.

After 6 months you will…

• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at The Browser Company.

• Be driving projects from conception to production launch.

• Be mentoring and pair programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase.

Qualifications

• Operating systems or low level systems experience. 8+ years of experience on the Operating System or other low level systems work. Some familiarity with one of our operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS) is preferred, but not required. Linux, VR/AR, or gaming systems experience is great too!

• A passion for build systems and tooling. You understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain. You’re excited about elegant, maintainable, and easy to use build tooling and configuration.

• Systems thinker. You’re a systems thinker and are motivated by solving hard technical challenges at the forefront of the industry. You’ve worked on large, complex codebases and understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain.

• Pragmatism and problem-solving. You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.

• You’re time zone overlaps with our team. We’re primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have at least 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

Compensation and Benefits

💰 With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to choose the cash-to-equity ratio that best suits their individual needs. Every offer we extend includes three options: a salary-optimized offer, an equity-optimized offer, and a balanced offer.

The annual salary range for this role is $225,000-275,000. The actual salary range offered will vary based on experience level and interview performance.

🧘🏻‍♀️ In addition to a competitive salary and equity package, we provide every employee with the following benefits:

• comprehensive benefits package with employee medical, dental, and vision - we cover 100% of premiums for employees, and up to 95% for dependents

• 401k plan

• flexible vacation policy - on average, our team members take between 15-20 vacation days a year, plus federal holidays (holidays vary by location)

• remote-friendly working environment - our core working hours are 11 AM-2 PM Eastern Time

• 12 weeks of paid parental leave

• $1,500 USD home office stipend

• Employees based in the US also receive additional services like free annual memberships to One Medical (where available), Talkspace, Teladoc, and HealthAdvocate

The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, New York. We strongly support diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

🚙 To read more about what we value as a company, check out Notes on Roadtrips on our blog.