Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

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 Staff Software Engineers, Infrastructure you’ll contribute to the tools, systems and infrastructure that allows us to ship features to hundreds of thousands of Arc Members quickly and safely. You’ll have the opportunity to work on different products and surfaces areas across the company — we value mobility and folks getting to work on the problems they’re most interested in!

Some of the current and upcoming projects our team is working on: building the scaffolding that will support our AI-driven personalization features, launching Arc on Windows and Android using our cross-language Swift platform (see more on our Swift interoperability work here), and extending Chromium to improve performance, privacy, and add additional AI and product features.

Overall you will...

• Scope and spearhead technical projects across server, client, browser, and OS layers.

• Design APIs that abstract away complexity and allow engineers to use those abstractions to quickly iterate, collaborating closely with engineering teams across the company in the process.

• Ensure efficient product development cycles by finding and fixing issues in the appropriate layer of the system.

• Invest in observability, tooling, stability, and performance alongside building new systems.

• 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...

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

• Attend a number of onboarding presentations on our product journey, the phases a startup goes through, our technical strategy, and more.

• Get familiar with Swift, our Chromium architecture, build tooling, and client-side infrastructure.

• Have shipped a few bug fixes and features across our codebase.

After 3 months you will be...

• 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.

• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company.

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

After 6 months you will be...

• Be familiar with Swift and C++ and how we interact with and build on top of our Chromium SDK.

• Be adjusting our terraform config to deploy new infrastructure or update our build pipelines.

• Own pieces of our infrastructure, and be the point-of-contact as product engineers have questions on how to improve performance or reliability.

• 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.

• 8+ years of experience leading critical projects or initiatives in client-side or C++ infrastructure environments. iOS or MacOS experience is preferred, but Android, Windows, or general browser experience is great too!

• You've worked on large, complex codebases and understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain.

• You're passionate about building tools and systems that make other engineers more productive and strive to make them elegant and maintainable.

• 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.