Software Engineer, Systems

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

At The Browser Company, we've taken a unique approach to building our Swift/Chromium web browsers for 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 and Dia using Swift. A small team of language compiler and systems engineers, led by Saleem Abdulrasool, have implemented the protocol that allows us to run our Swift code across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android. You can read more about our open source work on our company Github and our Speaking in Swift blog.

As a Systems Engineer at The Browser Company, you will focus on advancing Windows support for Swift and developing new features that benefit both our internal projects and the broader Swift community. Your work will directly contribute to our efforts to redefine how browsers and cross-platform applications are built, leveraging Swift as a core part of our technology stack. You'll have the opportunity to work closely with open-source communities while solving complex technical challenges that have a tangible impact on the future of software development.

Overall you will

• Spearhead technical projects for existing and new features across the Swift compiler, toolchain, SDK and frameworks for Windows.
• Port existing frameworks to Windows and fix Windows-specific bugs and tests.
• Monitor builds, investigating and fixing causes of failures in our Swift CI system.
• Maintain and improve support for platforms under development and ones that are currently unsupported (Windows ARM64, Android, etc).
• Build a macOS toolchain via GHA that we can use as an alternative toolchain in Xcode.
• Give back to the open source community. We believe in upstreaming our work to benefit the community that we benefit greatly 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 Windows toolchain and tooling, and our Windows roadmap
• Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our codebase and tooling
• 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 Swift architecture and contribute to ideas that will make our engineers' lives easier when prototyping and building new features.
• Shipped a few tickets to improve infrastructure pieces like our AI product infrastructure, deployment systems, release process, or feature flags infrastructure.
• Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, code reviews, code style, and more.
• Be involved in infrastructure discussions like how we add better observability to debug issues in production, how we better monitor performance regressions, or how we make our updater less finicky.
• Be regularly posting feedback about using the browser in our #dogfooding channel.

After 6 months you will...

• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at The Browser Company.
• Be driving projects from conception to production launch.
• Be mentoring and pair programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase.

Qualifications

• Operating systems or low level systems experience. 5+ years of experience on the Operating System or other low level systems work. Some familiarity with one of our operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS) is preferred, but not required. Linux, VR/AR, or gaming systems experience is great too!
• A passion for build systems and tooling. You understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain. You're excited about elegant, maintainable, and easy to use build tooling and configuration.
• Systems thinker. You're a systems thinker and are motivated by solving hard technical challenges at the forefront of the industry. You've worked on large, complex codebases and understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain.
• Pragmatism and problem-solving. You're pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.
• You're time zone overlaps with our team. We're primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have at least 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

• You resonate with our company values.

Compensation and Benefits

• Our total compensation for full-time employees includes base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. The annual base salary range for this role is $265,000 - $310,000 USD. The final offer will depend on your experience, expertise, and interview performance. Our goal is simple: if it feels like the right mutual fit, compensation shouldn’t be the thing that gets in the way. We’ve built a small, talent-dense team who cares deeply about their craft, and we pay competitively in line with current market benchmarks.
• Benefits. We offer best-in-class benefits (https://go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits) designed to support you, your family, and your life outside of work. Think big-company perks with startup-style impact, ownership, and ways of working — so you have the space and support to do the best work of your career.
• Location. We’re a remote-friendly company and can hire in the US or Canada. If you live in New York (or want to visit), you’re welcome to work from our office in Williamsburg.

The Browser Company is an ambitious team of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, 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.