Getting a Flutter Job

Eric Seidel

Eric Seidel

Founder & CEO

Flutter Jobs Cover Image

I founded the Flutter project 10 years ago, and led the Flutter team at Google for 8 years. I’m reasonably well known in the Flutter community and receive a lot of email from both job-seekers and job-posters regarding Flutter.

I’ve also been a manager for a decade and can tell you, hiring is hard—from both sides. It’s hard for companies to find candidates, and it’s hard for candidates to find companies.

This can be made extra-hard when trying to search for a subset of jobs which include a specific technology choice, like Flutter.

I generally try to dissuade both job-seekers and job-posters to search specifically for Flutter, under the belief that Flutter is a tool — a means to an end — and like other tools will come and go in popularity over time and what we all (ideally) focus on in our jobs is solving customer problems. As technologists, we learn whatever tools we need to do accomplish that goal including Flutter.

The difference is subtle, but I believe important. Most places that should be using Flutter may not know they should be using Flutter (because they haven’t hired the person to make that choice yet). Similarly, many developers who will be successful with Flutter may not be using it yet, because they’re using whatever technology is required by their current role to solve current problems.

That said, people understandably search for and advertise for “flutter jobs” and so here are some tips I give to be successful with such.

A as a Job Seeker

Two tips:

  1. As per my rant above, I’d recommend searching for “mobile jobs” or something broader than “flutter” for most searches. Flutter provides so many advantages over traditional mobile development, but the recruiter isn’t a technology expert, you are. The business likely knows “we need an iOS app”, but might not realize “we need a Flutter app”. There are lots of jobs looking for your skills who don’t know how to hire you. As the technologist, YOU will be making (or at least influencing) the decisions as to what tech stack to use.

  2. Consider small companies first. The larger macro-economy changes over time, but at time of writing (October 2024), I see a lot of activity and hiring for small companies, and only a beginning of a resurgence in hiring for larger ones. I’m not an economist, but that’s my sense.

Startups

Consulting

There are 10s (if not 100s?) of Flutter-specialized consultancies. This is typical for a new technology, that often “outside expertise” is hired before hiring might be done in-house. If you like having a variety of app work, Google keeps a list of good consultancies, many of which may be hiring:

I’ve personally worked with, and can attest to being excellent:

General

Recruiters

There are increasingly Flutter-specific recruiters. I don’t know any off-hand (you’re welcome to email me at eric@shorebird.dev if you are one), but I’ve met one or two at Flutter conferences, so I know it’s a thing.

Contacting a Flutter-specific recruiter might help you find some jobs you might have otherwise missed. Recruiters are literally paid to find you (they get paid a percentage of your first year of salary as a finders fee by the company), so they are typically very happy to know you exist.

Portfolios

Yes, you need a place for someone to see what you’ve built.

No, it doesn’t need to be a fancy portfolio. (But that doesn’t hurt.)

It’s just like a resume (or a website for some business). People want to be able to understand that you’ve successfully done stuff before (implying you are likely to do stuff for them too if hired), and they want to be able to browse through such on their own (e.g. a resume, portfolio site, GitHub, etc.)

I would encourage focusing one’s efforts on doing things and letting them be publicly visible if possible, rather than making the presentation of such amazing. Substance over form (unless you’re applying for a job like Design Engineer, where someone cares deeply about your design presentation).

A note on networking.

As mentioned, hiring is hard. There are so many factors, including importantly awareness and risk. A company needs to know you exist (find you somehow) and be convinced that you are a low-risk hire. Two of the ways to help with such is simply old-fashioned networking. Meeting people, and talking to people you already know about your problems/questions, in this case job seeking. Knowing someone, or having them be a friend-of-a-friend, eliminates both the factors of awareness and risk, so work your network as much as you can.

When I’m hiring (or job seeking), I keep a spreadsheet of relevant people I know and when I last talked to them, etc. You don’t have to go that far, but working your network will help.

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach can work, but generally is pretty low-chance. When it’s high chance is when you have something that the person on the other end of the email wants. As someone who knows Flutter, your probably do have something they want, you just may need to explain it to them in ways they understand. One way to do that is to present to them about how you can help them solve business problems with your skills.

As an example, Flutter is still a “new” technology. There are many companies that could sell services into the Flutter ecosystem (millions of devs!) but don’t yet. A (still low-percentage) tactic could be to reach out to one of these and pitch working on Flutter support for their product. Most of these companies are easily reachable on Twitter and LinkedIn, and even if they don’t have an opening can be useful. If I were to engage in such I would probably do so focused on my own personal learnings (e.g. I want to learn the Stripe API so I’ll build a demo of a great Stripe package) to maximize my own upside regardless of job outcome.

Get Noticed

This is related to having a portfolio, and cold out-reach, but a technique that has worked for me in finding jobs is simply doing something a company is already trying to do, just better. For example, you could re-build an app or a screen from an app, post it on GitHub and Tweet it (nicely) at the original company as a way of potentially catching attention both from the original company, or others in the Flutter community.

From the company’s perspective, if they’re considering hiring, you’ve already dramatically de-risked yourself. You clearly want to work on what they’re working on, and you have the skills to do it. So long as you were nice about your outreach, you’re also demonstrating your communication ability and ability to present your self. Win, Win, Win.

As with earlier discussions, I would encourage you to engage in any such exercise for you. There is a low chance the company will be hiring at that exact moment on that exact team, but you still walk away with more fodder for your portfolio and more skills under your belt.

As a Job Poster

In terms of posting jobs, my suggestions are similar to the above:

  1. Mention Flutter. A lot of devs want to work with Flutter, if you want to hire Flutter-aware devs or are at least considering Flutter as a possible technology, mention it.
  2. Get your job on the web. A publicly-accessible URL is key (and may be legally required for some jobs), if you have that (and not buried behind sign-in, etc.) others can share it.
  3. Get your network to share it! LinkedIn is great, but there are millions of Flutter devs, and most are not on LinkedIn. https://flutter.dev/community lists some Slack channels and Discord channels. You can also simply tweet at me (or tag me on LinkedIn) and I’m happy to share your job wider.
  4. If you can, hire remote. There are so many amazing Flutter Devs all over the world. Many of them are very capable adults who work well remotely.

If I’ve missed something, let me know.

Good luck all.

Eric

p.s. Shorebird is hiring.

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