Software Engineer, Windows
The Browser Company
Software Engineering
Remote
Posted on Thursday, December 15, 2022
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
As a Software Engineer working on Windows at The Browser Company, you will create tools, systems, scripts, and more that empower our teams to ship features to members quickly and safely. You’ll build software that answers questions like–
- How do we get the Swift developer environment on Windows to rival that of C# on Windows or Swift on Mac?
- How do we improve our Windows build times, and make our builds more stable?
- How do we improve the debugging experience on Windows?
- How do we set up a testing harness for our Windows app, and implement reliable UI tests?
- How do we architect our system such that security and privacy are built-in and require no extra effort to integrate into features?
- How do we automagically catch and mitigate performance regressions within all layers of our application?
Overall you will...
- Scope and spearhead technical projects across our Windows app, including within our toolchain, builds, developer tooling, and app architecture
- Design APIs that abstract away complexity and allow product engineers to iterate quickly, collaborating closely with other engineers across the company
- Ensure product development is progressing by finding and fixing inefficiencies in the appropriate layer of the system
- Effectively help the team 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...
- 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
- Have 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 Windows architecture, and be thinking of ways to make product engineers' lives easier when prototyping and building new features
- Be familiar with our Windows toolchain, our Swift bindings, and how we integrate with Chromium
- Shipped a few tickets to improve developer tools like our Windows toolchain, editor experience, debugger, or builds
- Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, 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, and how we make our updater less finicky
After 6 months you will...
- Be driving projects from conception to production launch
- Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company
- Be mentoring and pair programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase
Qualifications
- You have experience with the Windows OS, and familiarity with Windows App SDK and UWP APIs
- You understand how Windows apps are built, and have a high level understanding of Windows tooling and terminology like the Windows Performance Analyzer, PDBs, Visual Studio, MSIX installers, and more
- You’re familiar with multiple build systems such as CMake and MSBuild
- You’re familiar with C++ and WinRT/COM
- You have experience tech leading critical projects or initiatives within your team and organization
- You've worked on large, complex codebases
- You 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
- You're excited about elegant, maintainable, and easy to use build tooling and configuration
- You're pragmatic and can see the bigger picture; you're able to reason about prioritization and scope
- You bias to action. We like learning as quickly as possible, so we embrace failing fast to refine our code, systems, and processes rapidly
Compensation and Benefits
With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to design their compensation according to their needs. People join startups for different reasons and we want to be accommodating and flexible to everyone’s lives. Every candidate approved for an offer receives two options:
✉️ The first offer is a lower salary with a higher equity package
✉️ The second is a higher salary with a lower equity package.
Candidates can choose either option or anywhere in between the two on a sliding scale. The annual salary range for this role is $150,000-$300,000 USD, and 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:
- comprehensive benefits package, with employee medical, dental, and vision premiums covered at 100%
- 401k plan
- flexible vacation policy, with a recommended minimum of 20 days off (no maximum!)
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave
- $1,500 USD home office stipend
- Employees based in the US also receive free annual memberships to One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc, and HealthAdvocate
The Browser Company is a well funded, ambitious startup of about 60 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.