We’re hiring
You want to work at a startup. You want to work on a small team where every day is different and full of things to learn and do. You want to work on making the world a little better through Flutter.
You think app development is broken. You believe the world could be better if developers wrote for users, not platforms, and thus that the code they write could work great on any screen it was needed on. Flutter might be the solution that finally makes multi-platform the default, and you’re interested in working with us to make that happen.
You want to work at a place that treats you fairly. We work hard, but not crazy hours. We all have lots of responsibility (there are only 3 of us). We pay market wages, with good benefits and great equity.
You like working remotely. You know how to self-direct and set yourself up to succeed and communicate with others, even over distances. You like working on open source, where we get to hang out with our customers all-day, everyday on Discord.
Shorebird incorporated January 2023. We’ve shipped our first product (code push) and now support around 2000 monthly active users, with about 300 paying customers and strong growth. We raised several million dollars from a top-5 VC and great investors who care about our mission. We’re not profitable yet, but have two years of cash on hand.
We’re only 3 people right now. All of us have engineering backgrounds. As our customers have grown, so has our engineering load and we’re seeking to hire another full-stack engineer to help us scale to even larger customers. We’re also seeking to hire a “business person” to work with Eric to build out all the non-software parts of the business.
Recently we’ve focused on growing monthly active users. During our latest in-person summit in NYC, we did planning for next big features and products and now that we’re back to our respective cities, we’re burning through that list while supporting incoming customers.
We see about 40 new accounts sign up per day, about 3 of those become “active” (create a release/patch every month) and 1 of those buys a plan. We also get a couple of inbound SMB/enterprise sales calls per week through which Eric is learning enterprise sales.
The first hour or so every morning is spent working through the support queue which often results in small changes to the website, docs or code to avoid future customers hitting the same issues. The rest of the day is spent building. We have no meetings, no calendars, no perf reviews.
Most of the time we hang out on Discord video calls, but sometimes someone drops off to jam out to their music, get coffee or lunch, etc. We use the same Discord for private company chats and calls, private large-customer support channels, and our public community, which makes it very easy to talk to customers anytime we want to.
Engineers work across the whole stack. Our websites are in React (Astro), our backend and command-line tool are in Dart, our Database is postgres. We use Google Cloud, Redis and Cloudflare. We have our own fork of the Dart runtime and compiler (C++) and Flutter engine (C++) as well as an updater library (Rust) and a small Flutter package. Some of us prefer certain layers to others, but ideally you should want to work on most of the above and more as you help us add more products!
3-4 times a year we all get together in person for a week. We occasionally attend meetups or fly to visit customers. Engineers aren’t expected to attend any meetings, Eric has several customer meetings a week (and sometimes per day).
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.
We aspire to be “the Flutter company”. That means building an economic entity whose success is tied to Flutter, to finally help the world stop writing everything twice.
Google has been great to Flutter, but Flutter within Google is bound by Google’s own incentives, which don’t always align with that of Flutter’s millions of customers outside of Google. We’re trying to build a company whose success is aligned with the success of the businesses and developers using Flutter. A company trusted to provide high quality services around Flutter, and eventually fund the development of Flutter itself, if necessary.
If we’re successful, Shorebird will eventually be synonymous with Flutter. We hope to support every one of the millions of Flutter developers and the businesses behind them.
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’re fully remote. Current team members are located in California, Illinois, and New York (GMT-8 through GMT-5).
Our hiring is currently focused in the US, but we hope to expand globally over time. We are willing to consider candidates in 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.
We get together 3-4x per year as a company, all flying to some US city.
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.
We write the tools others will use to build Flutter apps, including the compiler used to build them and runtime used to execute them. The ideal candidate should have at least passing familiarity with the “lower” levels of our stack including using a systems-language (like C++) doing programming on mobile.
180-210k USD salary, 1.5% equity, and benefits.
As one of our first engineers, you will wear many hats and work across many systems over time.
You
You will
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.
We’re most interested 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. We will do a technical screen, which involves writing code together (e.g. write a small Dart command line app to do X). You’ll talk to all 3 of us and check mutual references. If it’s a mutual fit, we’ll make you an offer.
Shorebird currently consists of 3 software engineers. We’re great at what we do, but we have little “business experience”. The most pressing issues facing the company are no longer “can we build it”, but “can we build a business around this”, which is a lot of “can we market, package, sell in a way that the market understands.” We’re learning on the job, but are also looking for someone with experience and desire to work on the many non-technical aspects of the business with Eric (CEO). We’re looking for someone to join us and help us better reach and serve an influx of customers in capacities other than writing software.
Listing a salary range for compliance, we will calibrate compensation to the individuals applying. We target 75% of market with our base pay. I see this as a career/senior (3-5 years experience) role, involving involving nearly unbounded growth potential. This role will be salary/equity compensated, not commission. Our incentives should be aligned to build/grow the business over a long time horizon.
130-175k USD salary, 1.5% equity, and benefits.
You
This is a very broad role description, since we have so many different things to do! You’re not expected to do everything, but you will have nearly unbounded opportunity to be engaged in the business. We’ll work together to figure out what the business needs most, figure out who’s going to do it, figure out how to do it (most things I do I’ve never done before) and then execute.
You will be responsible for as much of the “business side” of Shorebird as you want. There is simply too much for Eric to do alone. You will be building out our business capabilities (not managing existing processes), including figuring out how best to reach customers, writing content, debugging our funnel, improving our website, deciding marketing/events/communications strategy, etc. I expect someone successful in this role to have a lot of opinions and we will figure out what to do and learn together how to grow Shorebird’s business.
We’re most interested 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. Since I am not a “business” expert, you will probably also meet with one of our investors or other other startup founders as well as our team. The process can be very quick. If it’s a mutual fit, we’ll make you an offer.