Founding iOS Engineer

Amarina Search Partners•New York, NY

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is hiring a Founding iOS Engineer to build the next-generation iOS experience from the ground up. This is a rare opportunity to define the architecture, engineering standards, user experience, and technical direction of a new native iOS app at a company with real scale, strong momentum, and meaningful product complexity. You will help shape how millions of users discover, book, and enjoy our client's features on mobile across search, property details, booking, account, and post-booking experiences. This is not a role for someone looking to simply implement tickets. We’re looking for an engineer with strong product instincts, excellent engineering judgment, and a high bar for craft, someone who wants to help define what mobile should be at our client for years to come. You’ll work closely with Product, Design, Backend, Data, and company leadership. You’ll own critical decisions end-to-end, from architecture and developer experience to app performance, reliability, analytics, and release quality. You will also help shape our broader mobile app strategy and, over time, help build the iOS team and engineering culture around you.

Requirements

5+ years building production iOS applications with meaningful consumer-facing scale, quality, and complexity.
Strong command of Swift and modern iOS development patterns.
Experience building polished native experiences with strong attention to performance, usability, animation, responsiveness, and edge cases.
You have led or heavily influenced architecture decisions for a substantial iOS codebase.
You care deeply about product quality and can translate complex states and workflows into simple, elegant user experiences.
You know how to move fast without creating long-term fragility.
You’re comfortable working closely with backend engineers on APIs, data contracts, and systems tradeoffs.
You have strong engineering fundamentals: code quality, testing discipline, observability, release reliability, and operational ownership.
You are energized by zero-to-one work and want real ownership, not a narrow lane.
You bring taste and judgment. You know when to insist on quality, when to simplify, and how to make smart tradeoffs in a fast-moving company.
Ideally, you’ve worked on high-quality consumer products at top engineering organizations or elite startups where the bar for craft and execution is exceptionally high.
You’re a good person. Building a startup is hard. Being thoughtful, low-ego, and great to work with should not be. We care deeply about building an ambitious team with a strong culture.

Responsibilities

Own the iOS app end-to-end across core marketplace flows including search, discovery, property details, booking, account, and post-booking.
Build a high-quality native iOS codebase from the ground up, including architecture, state management, networking, observability, testing strategy, CI/CD, and release processes.
Partner closely with Product and Design to build intuitive, polished, trustworthy mobile experiences with excellent attention to detail.
Help define our mobile app strategy, including where mobile should lead, how it should differentiate from web, and where it can create the most leverage for the business.
Work with backend engineers to shape API contracts that make the app fast, resilient, and easy to evolve.
Drive performance, reliability, and quality across startup time, navigation, rendering, networking, offline handling, error states, and app stability.
Instrument the app thoughtfully so product and engineering teams can measure funnels, understand behavior, and iterate with confidence.
Set the technical bar for iOS engineering through architecture decisions, code reviews, testing discipline, and pragmatic engineering standards.
Help define the long-term mobile platform strategy, including how we scale the codebase, development practices, and team over time.
Play a foundational leadership role in building the iOS function, including helping attract, mentor, and eventually build a strong team around you.
Contribute to product thinking, not just implementation, by bringing strong opinions on UX quality, mobile-first opportunities, and smart tradeoffs.