Founding iOS Engineer

Job Summary

Our client - a fast growing hospitality marketplace - is seeking an entrepreneurial Founding iOS Engineer to spearhead and build the next-generation native iOS application from scratch.

This is a premier, high-impact opportunity to architect the technical foundation, set engineering benchmarks, and steer the product direction for a scaling marketplace with complex product workflows. You will directly shape how millions of users interact with the platform—spanning search, property exploration, booking, profile management, and post-booking experiences.

The client is not looking for someone who simply executes predefined tasks. They want an engineer with acute product instincts, sharp technical judgment, and an uncompromised dedication to software craftsmanship who wants to define the mobile footprint for years to come.

Collaborating closely with Leadership, Product, Design, Backend, and Data teams, you will possess complete autonomy over critical decisions—from system architecture and developer tooling to app performance, observability, and release infrastructure. Over time, you will also play a key role in cultivating the iOS team and engineering culture.

Responsibilities

• End-to-End Ownership: Drive the iOS development for all core marketplace funnels, including search, discovery, property details, checkout, account management, and post-booking features.
• Greenfield Architecture: Establish a pristine native iOS codebase from scratch, defining patterns for state management, networking, testing, CI/CD pipelines, and release management.
• Product Collaboration: Partner with Product and Design teams to craft intuitive, highly polished, and reliable mobile interfaces with meticulous attention to detail.
• Mobile Strategy: Shape the strategic direction of our mobile product, identifying unique mobile-first advantages and ways to differentiate the app from our web experience.
• API Design: Work alongside backend engineers to design clean, resilient API contracts that allow the application to remain fast and easily adaptable.
• Performance & Stability: Continuously optimize app health, focusing on launch times, smooth navigation, rendering, networking efficiency, offline functionality, and error handling.
• Analytics & Observability: Implement comprehensive telemetry and instrumentation to empower product and engineering teams to track user behavior and iterate confidently based on data.
• Technical Leadership: Set a high bar for engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, thoughtful architecture decisions, and pragmatic engineering standards.
• Scale the Platform: Build out the long-term mobile platform roadmap, establishing how our codebase, developer workflows, and team structure will scale over time.
• Team Building: Act as a foundational leader for the iOS org, helping attract, mentor, and grow a world-class team around you.
• Product Contribution: Bring strong opinions on mobile UX, proactively suggesting user experience improvements and weighing smart technical tradeoffs rather than just writing code.

Tech Stack

• iOS: Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit
• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Node.js
• Data: Postgres, MongoDB
• Infra / Observability: AWS, Datadog
• Testing: XCTest, UI Testing, CI/CD pipelines

Candidate Profile

• Experience: 5+ years of experience developing production-grade iOS applications featuring significant consumer-facing scale, high complexity, and polished design.
• Technical Mastery: Exceptional command of Swift and contemporary iOS design patterns.
• Craftsmanship: Proven track record of shipping fluid native experiences with a sharp focus on responsiveness, fluid animations, performance, and handling edge cases.
• Architectural Influence: Experience leading or heavily contributing to the architectural layout of a substantial iOS application.
• Product Mindset: Deep care for product quality, with the ability to translate complex business workflows into elegant, seamless user interactions.
• Agility: The ability to move quickly and deliver features without accumulating technical debt or long-term structural fragility.
• Systems Collaboration: Comfortable partnering with backend teams on data contracts, API design, and system-wide tradeoffs.
• Engineering Rigor: Strong foundational habits around code quality, test coverage, system observability, release safety, and operational accountability.
• Zero-to-One Drive: Motivated by greenfield projects and eager for broad ownership rather than a narrow, siloed scope.
• Pragmatism & Taste: Excellent judgment on when to push for perfection, when to simplify, and how to execute smart tradeoffs in a fast-paced environment.
• Background: Ideally, you have built high-caliber consumer products within elite startups or top-tier engineering organizations known for execution excellence.
• Culture Add: A thoughtful, low-ego, and collaborative teammate. We believe building a company is a team sport and value a highly ambitious yet supportive culture.

Location: New York, NY (In-Person, 4 days/week Mon-Thu)

Compensation: Very attractive base salary + benefits + substantial equity