Founding Engineer

Palo Alto, hybrid preferred. US-Remote considered for candidates who are exceptionally well-fit or referred. Reports to the CEO. $185,000 to $250,000 base plus 0.5% to 1.5% equity. Hiring now.

If you know someone at Shorebird, ask them to refer you. Past startup experience highly valued.

Shorebird is building the best way to write mobile apps.

Our founder and CEO, Eric, started Flutter at Google. Now we're building the next generation of mobile tooling. Mobile is where most humans spend most of their time computing, yet mobile development is slow, designed for pre-agent workflows, and locked to laptops. We think that whole experience can be an order of magnitude better, and that unlocking it unlocks an order of magnitude more developers.

We believe portable software is the best way to write software, for agents and humans, and what is missing is someone to stand up for it and demonstrate that: someone willing to build at any layer of the system, whose incentives align with the customers rather than the platform's. Shorebird is that.

Portable software also turns out to be unusually good for agents. One codebase, one toolchain, and a renderer that draws the same pixels on every screen means an agent can build, run, and see an app anywhere, including a Linux box in the cloud, and trust that what it sees is what ships. Most people have not noticed this yet. Showing them is our opportunity.

Writing the app is the start. Shipping it, seeing it run on real devices, and fixing it in the field are all problems we help solve.

Our tooling, including our fork of Flutter, is free. The services on top of it are not, and the businesses that succeed with mobile pay for them. The better mobile development gets, the more people build for it, and the more of them need what we sell. Customers want to buy from us because it gives them a vote in the outcome, something they never had when Eric ran Google's Flutter team. They pay us, we listen, and we build what they need.

We've built a working business over the last 3.5 years, mostly as 3 people, and have scaled to 7. Over a thousand businesses pay us every month, from solo developers to some of the largest brands in the world, across dozens of countries. We just closed another round with our existing investors, and we're close to profitable at our current size, with over two and a half years of runway in the bank. We're entering a new phase of product expansion and need your help to build a ton of new features, products and services for our customers. We are hiring multiple engineers for this role.

Really full stack

Most companies that say full stack mean a web frontend and the server behind it. Ours means owning not just web pages and servers, but compilers and frameworks and libraries shipping on hundreds of millions of devices every month. You don't have to touch every layer, but at Shorebird you can, and our existing team does.

Concretely: Dart (backend services, CLI, and our Flutter framework fork), C++ (our Flutter engine and Dart VM forks), Rust (the updater), TypeScript and React (the console), on GCP and Cloudflare with Postgres and Redis, built and tested on GitHub Actions.

Nobody is fluent in all of it on day one, and we are not looking for someone who claims to be. Agents are very good at carrying you into code you have never seen. You will work directly with Eric (Founder/CEO), and with Nick, who owns our cloud and runtime, and Mac, who is full stack. What you need is to want to work at breadth, and to learn quickly.

You would join a team of seven as our third full time engineer.

What we're building

There are three sides to our business, and depending on your interests and customer needs, over time you will contribute to all three:

1. Code Push, our flagship product. There is a great deal left to do: a truly global cloud (China included), asset support in patches, hot restart support, optimizations to our "linker", compiler, runtime & build size, better support for AAR and add to app builds, and a long list of work to serve this customer base.

2. Products that grow out of Code Push. Our customers build with our CLI, run on our runtime, and ship through our servers. Nobody else sits at all three points, and every one of them is a place to build something they need and will happily pay for. Mission Control is the first, shipped recently: MAUs, build times, app size. Next come the things only a runtime owner can do, like automatic crash reporting, analytics, and software that heals itself in the field, and the things only a build owner can do, like faster and smaller builds, build caching, ecosystem reliability data, and private packages. This customer base is compounding, and most of what we could build for it does not exist yet.

3. Development time, not just production time. This is where most of our energy is going right now. Everything above happens after an app ships. Code Push has been a successful business, but it has a ceiling: you only need it, or anything in #2, once you already have a successful app in the stores. The best way to develop for mobile has to start where development starts, when the app is being written, and it has to reach people who are not yet building a mobile app at all. So the whole company is moving earlier in the lifecycle ("shifting left," if you have heard the term). We're currently releasing products that make it dramatically easier for agents to develop for mobile. That is where a lot of what comes next will be built.

Much of this will be yours to own by the end of your first quarter.

How we work

• Low process, not no process: we run cycles in Linear and keep a roadmap, and that is most of it. You will commit on your first day and get to keep a maker's schedule.
• For developers, by developers. We try to be our customers and build for them.
• The doer decides. Responsibility deserves autonomy. Our handbook is public, including how to work with Eric
• Work divides by interest.
• Agents write a lot of our code. Your job is knowing when it is right and owning the outcome
• Our customers are in our Discord and you will talk to them directly
• Remote by default as a company. This role is intentionally hybrid in Palo Alto: we are exploring what a concentration of the team in one place does for us

Is this you?

Level. Mid through staff. There is more work here than people, so ambition, how fast you learn, and ability to work at breadth matter more to us than years. Compensation follows level.

Background. At least 5 years of professional software development, and you have shipped production software that real users depended on. Strong in at least one of mobile (Flutter, iOS, or Android), backend and cloud, or systems (C++, Rust), and curious about the other two.

• You are comfortable with little structure. We have cycles and a roadmap, not a platform team or a DevOps team; when something you need does not exist, you build it
• You have picked up a large codebase you didn't write and made yourself productive in it

This is probably not for you if:

• You need someone to tell you day to day what to work on, or the scaffolding of a larger company before you can start: someone else to pick the process, set up the tooling, choose the vendor, write the checklist
• You want to own one system and go deep on it for years without touching anything else
• You find low level code a chore rather than a draw. Not all of the work is low level, but some of it is, and you will hit it
• You want to build apps rather than the tools apps are built with

Bonus:

• Contributions to a large open source project, or experience working on a fork of one
• Experience with build systems, deployment pipelines, or developer tools
• Dart, Flutter, Rust, or C++

What your days will look like

First day. Set up your Mac and your Claude subscription, then use the product. Write a friction log as you go: every rough edge you hit as a new user is one our customers hit too. Then pick one of those rough edges and fix it.

First week. If you have not used Flutter before, this is when you learn it. Build your own app with our product, end to end, and keep fixing what you hit along the way. See how our live apps work with our product. This is how you learn the architecture: by being a customer of it first.

First couple of weeks. We pick a small feature from the product backlog and you carve it out and own it end to end, design through ship.

First month. We help you find your area. Depending on your background and what pulls you, that might be our cloud, our UI, our CLI, the mobile runtime, the compiler, or somewhere else. There are a lot of surfaces to choose from. Your first real project will be a customer ask: we hand you a request from a real customer and ask you to deliver it.

Beyond that. We build new things together. We have far more customers asking, and a far longer backlog of new products we want to build, than we have people to build them. That is why you are here.

Logistics

Reports to. Eric, founder and CEO.

Location. Palo Alto, hybrid preferred. We have a small office in Palo Alto today. We will consider US remote for candidates who are exceptionally well-fit or referred.

Compensation. $185,000 to $250,000 base for Palo Alto, depending on level and experience, plus 0.5% to 1.5% equity. Higher for exceptionally senior candidates. Base is adjusted regionally for remote hires.

Benefits. Health, dental, and vision; 401(k) with a 4% match; paid time off; the equipment you need. Details are in our handbook.

Offsites. The whole team gathers in person four times a year. Expenses, of course, covered.

On call. None at this time. We expect to set up a minimal rotation within the next year.

Work authorization. We will consider visa sponsorship on a case by case basis.

Interview process

Three conversations and two reference checks, about two weeks end to end.

• Intro call (30 min). Role fit and what you want to be doing
• Pairing session (90 min). Live coding on a small problem in the language of your choice, plus design discussion in your area of comfort. AI autocomplete off for the exercise, though we use it every day otherwise.
• Team fit (60 min).

At least one of these is in person in Palo Alto.

Include a link to something you built with your application.

Shorebird is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $185 - $250 per year.