AI-First iOS Engineer

Role Description

Grove is hiring an AI-First iOS Engineer — a senior, single-threaded owner of our iOS surface who operates as an "engineer-as-a-team." This isn't a role where you hand-write every line and lean on AI for autocomplete. This is a role where AI is your primary instrument: you direct fleets of coding agents, generate, review, and refactor at orders of magnitude beyond what a traditional engineer can produce, and take total ownership of features end-to-end — from discovery through production. You will be measured by what ships, what stays up, and what customers feel — not by lines of code or tokens used.

You operate in a new-world environment where one well-equipped engineer can deliver the output of a small team. We expect you to compound your own leverage every quarter: better prompts, better evals, better agent harnesses, better guardrails. The bar isn't "uses AI tools." The bar is "runs AI like a team you manage."

What You’ll Own

• Direct multiple AI coding agents in parallel to design, build, test, and ship iOS features in Swift, UIKit, and (increasingly) SwiftUI.
• Take total ownership of a slice of the iOS app — discovery, scoping, architecture, implementation, QA, release, monitoring, and iteration.
• Run an "engineer-as-a-team" workflow — spawn agents for spec drafting, codegen, test generation, code review, refactoring, doc writing, and bug triage, then merge, judge, and ship.
• Develop and defend a strong point of view on what good iOS code looks like inside Grove's architecture.
• Design prompts, evals, and harnesses that make AI-assisted mobile development repeatable and measurable, not artisanal.
• Stand up automation that closes the loop: Fastlane lanes, CircleCI checks, TestFlight distribution, device test farms, telemetry-driven rollback, and AI-powered review gates.
• Drive architecture decisions with AI as a research and prototyping partner.
• Collaborate with other engineers on architecture and trade-offs.
• Own production health autonomously — monitor Sentry, Datadog, Cloudflare, and Firebase to assess system health.
• Mentor the Heady contractor team on AI-native workflows and share learnings with mobile peers.
• Triage Sentry crashes, hotfix, and root-cause incidents with AI-assisted investigation and remediation.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of professional iOS development experience with a portfolio of shipped consumer apps at scale.
• Native, demonstrable fluency with modern AI coding tooling.
• Strong, opinionated taste in Swift, UIKit, and SwiftUI.
• Comfortable in repos that use Coordinator/AppController patterns, protocol-driven Services and Data Managers, and value-type ViewModels.
• Experience integrating with JSON:API-style backends and Shopify storefront/checkout APIs at consumer scale.
• A bias toward owning end-to-end outcomes rather than handing off work at team boundaries.
• Genuinely autonomous in operation.
• Comfort writing prompts, evals, and guardrails.
• Sharp written communication.
• A collaborative, ego-light disposition.

Even Better If You Have

• Experience designing custom agents, MCP tools, or AI-assisted code review pipelines.
• Deep experience with Combine, async/await, and modern state management.
• Comfort with CocoaPods, Fastlane, CircleCI, TestFlight automation, and XCTest/snapshot testing pipelines.
• Familiarity with the Grove-adjacent stack.
• Experience with the Anchorage layout library or equivalent code-first UIKit layout systems.
• Subscription / e-commerce mobile experience.
• Exposure to feature flags, experimentation platforms, and analytics instrumentation.
• Experience contributing to a team's shift toward AI-native development practices.

Benefits

• This full-time, exempt position is remote for candidates based in specified states.
• Competitive benefits - medical, vision, dental.
• Equity - shared success is core to our mission.
• Flexible Paid Time Off - we care most about results.
• Free VIP membership and 50% employee discount.
• Working for a company that believes in creating products and funding initiatives that help the planet!

Compensation

The salary range for this role is $175,000-225,000. Our compensation bands are determined based on market-specific cost of living data, meaning that the top of our salary range is reserved for the most experienced candidates in the highest cost of living areas across the country. In addition to the base salary, this role is eligible for an annual incentive target and equity.