Staff Software Engineer, Chromium

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.

As a Chromium Engineer on the Product Team, your contributions will be at the core of our next product — a browser that's smart, personalized, and takes work off your plate. By collaborating with various teams across the company, you’ll help unlock the full potential of the Chromium ecosystem and enable the team to build first-of-its-kind features into a browser. Used by hundreds of thousands of daily active users, your work will help shape the future of how people use the internet.

About our app architecture

Our team took a unique approach to building Arc — we packaged Chromium as an SDK and wrapped our Swift code around it. Our Swift code base is shared across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android (more on our Swift interoperability work can be found here).

• Design and spearhead projects for improving Chromium architecture and building new features.

• Increase the engineering team’s iteration speed by improving our Chromium codebase with security and infrastructure updates.

• Advise and direct fellow engineers on the architecture and capabilities of Chromium.

• Create new APIs and optimize existing ones that allow for a seamless integration with our product code base.

• Improve our product and release lifecycle and ensure that our products continue to improve in performance and stability over time.

• Interact with the broader Chromium community, including collaborating with core contributors as needs arise.

After 1 month you will...

• Get onboarded onto the team and codebase with an onboarding buddy

• Receive a number of onboarding presentation on how we give each other feedback, the phases a startup goes through, our technical strategy, and more

• Get familiar with our Chromium codebase, app architecture, and developer environment

• Have shipped at least one change to a Chromium API in service of a product feature

• Have shipped at least one change in Swift to the product codebase

• Have pair programmed with others on our engineering team

After 3 months you will...

• Be a point of contact for bugs, crashes, and architecture in our Chromium code base

• Have supported large-scope projects that require challenging technical solutions in our Chromium code base

• Have shadowed our processes for keeping Arc up-to-date with Chromium upstream

• Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more

• Be involved and help drive discussions around Chromium updates and best practices for developing new features with other engineers

• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company, especially in the Chromium/infra space

• Be contributing to on-call rotations and jumping into incidents to support the team

After 6 months you will...

• Have a large role in defining Browser Company’s technical roadmap as it relates to how the product and Chromium parts of the codebase interface

• Help define our standards for how Chromium engineers integrate with product engineers on our team

• Identify and lead projects leveraging your knowledge of both company direction and Chromium’s direction

• Be actively supporting and mentoring other engineers in understanding our Chromium code base and simplifying entry points for accessing the parts they need access to

• You have 8+ years of production level coding experience, including 5+ years with C++

• You’ve previously worked with Chromium or have an interest in working on a browser and learning Chromium, including working with the broader open source community

• You’re flexible and interested in working across our entire tech stack, including learning Swift

• You have experience independently running critical projects or initiatives with minimal guidance

• You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles

• We’re primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone

💰 With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to choose the cash-to-equity ratio that best suits their individual needs. Every offer we extend includes three options: a salary-optimized offer, an equity-optimized offer, and a balanced offer.

The annual salary range for this role is $225,000-275,000 USD. The actual salary range offered will vary based on experience level and interview performance.

🧘🏻‍♀️ In addition to a competitive salary and equity package, we provide every employee with the following benefits:

• comprehensive benefits package with employee medical, dental, and vision - we cover 100% of premiums for employees, and up to 95% for dependents

• 401k plan

• flexible vacation policy - on average, our team members take between 15-20 vacation days a year, plus federal holidays (holidays vary by location)

• remote-friendly working environment - our core working hours are 11 AM-2 PM Eastern Time

• 12 weeks of paid parental leave

• $1,500 USD home office stipend, refreshed after 2 years

• Employees based in the US also receive additional services like free annual memberships to One Medical (where available), Talkspace, Teladoc, and HealthAdvocate

The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup of about 85 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work in office in 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.