Dec 30
Founding iOS Engineer at MagicBell [Async Remote]
Your role
As our founding iOS engineer, you will help us launch our iOS SDK. Functionally, the SDK would be similar to the React SDK. It would offer our notification inbox to iOS developers. However, we'd like for you to optimize the UI/UX for a pleasant iOS experience. Like the React SDK, we want to support extensive customization, well-designed components, and even a lite-SDK to offer only the network layer. We'd love to optimize everything from supported gestures to animations for a best-in-class mobile experience. You will also be responsible for crafting the documentation and user guides and working with the early customers to help them integrate the SDK into their products.
As we grow, the opportunity to manage a team of mobile developers will surface. However, if you'd rather be a high-performing individual contributor, that's fine with us too.
Responsibilities
- Defining the functional and technical spec of the application in close collaboration with the product team and our customers.
- Working with the product manager to scope out stories and sprints.
- Implement the functionality along with unit and integration tests. Setup builds using a CI system (We use CircleCI, but you can pick something else for mobile).
- Hire, attract, and onboard other great engineers. You can help by referring candidates, writing blog posts about the technical challenges, and delivering tech talks at meetups and conferences. We are happy to cover any costs incurred.
- Shape the culture of our company to create the next Stripe, Twilio, or your favorite company.
- Be our developer evangelist:
- Our go-to-market strategy involves bottom-up developer adoption. Therefore, our entire team is an evangelist for our product - all of us write blog posts sharing what we have learned, and we talk to our users directly. (We have some of our biggest customers on a shared Slack workspace)
-
- We love building with our own API. In the past, we have built some fun little hacks to get developer attention, like our Hacker News Chrome extension and Firefox add-on. We plan to build more of these as we grow, so hit us up if you have any ideas!
Requirements
These requirements have been selected to make sure you'd be successful at the job. Please read them carefully:
- 4+ years of experience working on iOS with Swift. Experience in shipping SDKs is a major plus.
- Experience writing test-driven code with an understanding of integration testing. We require a minimum of two years of test-driven development experience.
- Willingness to go above and beyond. For example, keeping track of new security vulnerabilities that might impact us or fixing customer issues proactively and notifying them.
- Enjoy taking on challenging responsibilities. (We are a startup, after all!) This includes maintaining our uptime and finding creative ways to help customers achieve their goals.
- Good writing ability as demonstrated by documentation, README, or blog posts you have written.
- Excellent communication skills in English. This helps immensely as a remote team.
Nice-to-Have
- An ability to ship an MVP quickly so we can attract feedback early.
- An eye for UX and an understanding of the iOS design patterns.
- A good understanding of software architecture & object-oriented design patterns (like SOLID).
- A desire to start your own startup either now or in the future. Startups are hard, and this aspiration will help you appreciate the challenges in the job. You'll get hands-on learning of what building an early-stage startup is like. As a bonus, the founders are prolific angel investors and eager to invest in the startups of our alumni.
Interesting Challenges
As our founding mobile engineer, you will get to own this product end-to-end. This will naturally present many challenges to you. Here are some that we foresee:
- Performant state management across multiple devices with real-time synchronization.
- Building robust logging and analytics to help our customers understand the flow of their notifications.
- Engineering reliability and performance so we can scale up with our customers.
- Improving the UX/DX as you build new features or improve existing ones. Keeping new releases backward compatible for as long as we can.
A big reason why we love working on MagicBell is that we get to build for other developers. You'll get to work with some of the brightest engineers (our customers) to help them build notifications faster than they ever imagined. We routinely chat with them on our Slack Community (join us there!).
The Offer
We pay well and offer meaningful equity (every full-time employee has equity). We can't match Google/Facebook in their perks, but we make sure you have everything you need to do the best work you have done in your career.
Location: Fully remote
Salary: $120k - $170k (or more if you have a lot more experience than our requirements)
Equity: 0.50% - 1.00% with standard 4-year vesting and an extended 10-year exercise window after 2 years in service. Read why this matters.
Hours: Up to 40 hrs/week. While we don't overwork routinely, as a startup, there are times when you need to work beyond your regular work hours or fix something on the weekend. If that is a strict no for you, we suggest not applying.
Flexible work: We require the EST 10 am to 1 pm overlap, and the rest of the time is up to you to manage. Few meetings, mostly asynchronous communication, and other day-to-day details on our blog.
Time off: 30 working days a year (20 PTO and 10 public holidays. You are welcome to take sick days as you need them).
Benefits: Healthcare (with Dental & Vision in the US), paid time off, and an annual all-expense-paid retreat somewhere beautiful. $1k/yr to attend any conferences/events that you find useful.
WFH Support: $5k for computer, standing desk, mic, or anything else you need. Up to $300/mo for a co-working desk. If you need anything else, please ask.
If you read the entire job description, please list out which of the nice-to-haves you possess in the last question of the form.
Location
WORLDWIDE
Salary and compensation
$120,000 - $170,000 / year
