The problem: Today, businesses write the same app at least twice at 2x the necessary costs, with redundant code-bases, teams, bug lists. Flutter has proven that high-quality multi-platform is possible. However, adopting Flutter can be challenging since the default offerings from Google are sometimes an ill fit or incomplete for non-Google teams. Shorebird is filling in the gaps businesses need to be successful with Flutter development, starting with code push.
There are more screens every day, and they don’t all run iOS (or even Android). Yet consumers expect the a level of polish and performance on every screen that the Web cannot deliver (Eric spent a decade trying). Flutter can, but businesses need help to be successful with Flutter. That’s where we come in.
We’re here to save developers and business time and money, help them provide their customers with better experiences, and hopefully make the world a better place.
The primary unlock we made in building Flutter was bringing circa 2014 web tech to mobile (reactive programming, hot reload, etc). Shorebird is repeating this by bringing 2024 web tech to mobile (blurring client/server, always up-to-date deploys, etc).
We’re a default-public organization, we operate on a public discord, our source and planning are public. We’re an all remote, distributed team.
More information about the company we’re trying to build can be found in our public handbook
We write the tools others will use to build Flutter apps, including the compiler used to build them and runtime used to execute them. We’re looking for someone who enjoys working down at the “lower” levels of our system including the forks of the Flutter and Dart runtime and compiler.
As one of our first engineers, you will wear many hats and work across many systems over time. You will work with a diverse and distributed team of exceptional engineers to build the future of development for any screen.
You will be responsible for many of the “lowest levels” of the product, working on the C++/C/Rust code that powers Dart VM and compiler, Flutter’s engine and Shorebird’s updater. This will include working on performance at these layers and working with the rest of the team to maintain our forks of millions of lines of C++ code.
You will be responsible for many design decisions within the product, and will be expected to be able to make tradeoffs between different approaches. You will be expected to be able to work within a distributed team of engineers to build a product that is easy to use, performant, secure and delightful to developers. That starts of course by building something we ourselves want to use.
We’re all-remote, current team members are located in California, Illinois and New York (GMT-8 through GMT-5). Will consider GMT-10 through GMT-3. We communicate exclusively through Discord (both in public and private) including often leaving video calls open in the background while we work independently.
150-200k USD salary, 2% equity, and benefits.
Experience working on reused code (e.g. APIs, libraries, tools, build systems) or in systems which are too large for any single person to understand would serve you well in this role.
No, we don’t ask you to do coding exercises. We’re interested most in your past projects/accomplishments (do you ship stuff?), your desire to work at a startup (on this mission in particular), and your ability to communicate clearly. You’ll talk to all 3 of us, possibly do a small project together and check mutual references. If it’s a mutual fit, we’ll make you an offer.
We raised a seed round back in Jan 2023 from awesome VC and angel investors. We have about 100 paying customers, 1000s of dollars of MRR and many years of runway. We’re happy to put you in touch with any references you should need to verify we’re the real deal. This is an awesome team and we’d like you on it.
If you’re interested in joining us, please email eric@shorebird.dev. You can also (and are encouraged to) hop on our Discord and chat with us there. We do pretty much everything in the public so you can very much see what we’re like without even needing to apply.