Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

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 but mighty team of language compiler engineers, led by Saleem Abdulrasool, have built the protocol that allows us to run our singular Swift code base across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

As a Software Engineer on the Developer Experience Team, you’ll partner closely with the Swift Toolchain and Security team to build the tools, systems, and developer environments that empower our team to quickly and safely ship features to millions of members. We’re excited to share our work with the broader community and have shared many of our projects to open source, working closely with the head of Swift Language at Apple and the LLVM Foundation.

Overall you will...

• Scope and spearhead technical projects across our Windows and Mac developer ecosystem, including within our toolchain, builds, developer tooling, and testing architecture.

• Design APIs and tools that abstract away complexity and enable product engineers to collaborate and iterate on our core products.

• Ensure product development is progressing quickly by finding and fixing inefficiencies in the appropriate layer of the system.

• Dig into various layers of our development stack to improve performance and ergonomics, including our compiler, dependencies, editor, language server, build system and CI/CD pipelines.

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

After 1 month you will...

• Onboard onto our team and codebase with your onboarding buddy

• Attend a number of onboarding presentations on the company, product, codebase, and culture

• Get familiar with Swift, our Swift toolchain and tooling, and our Windows and Mac roadmap

• Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our codebase and tooling

• Have pair programmed with a few people on the engineering team

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

After 3 months you will...

• Be familiar with our Windows and Mac dev environment, analyzing ways to make engineers' lives easier with tools and automation.

• Be familiar with our Swift toolchain, Swift for Windows bindings, and how we integrate with Chromium.

• Ship a few tickets to improve developer tools like our Swift toolchain, editor experience, debugger, or builds.

• Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more.

• Be contributing to on-call rotations and jumping into incidents to support the team.

• Be involved in infrastructure discussions like how we add better observability to debug issues in production, how to improve monitor performance regressions, and how we stabilize our updater.

After 6 months you will...

• Leading projects from conception to launch, working cross functionally as needed, and helping to scope out future project work for the team.

• Making a lasting impact on our engineering efficiency and the safety of our release cycles.

• Be interviewing candidates to join the Browser Company.

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

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience with developer tools and build environments, open-source developer tooling, or low-level systems experience.

• You’re an expert in at least 1 build system and have had exposure to different kinds of build systems such as CMake, Bazel, Buck, or MSBuild.

• You’re well-versed in C++ or open to becoming a C++ and Swift expert.

• You're passionate about building tools and systems that make other engineers more productive and strive to make them elegant and maintainable.

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

• We’re primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have 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 USD. 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 about 85 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work in office in 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.