Lead iOS Engineer

webAI•Austin, TX

About The Position

About Us: webAI is pioneering the future of artificial intelligence by establishing the first distributed AI infrastructure dedicated to personalized AI. We recognize the evolving demands of a data-driven society for scalability and flexibility, and we firmly believe that the future of AI lies in distributed processing at the edge, bringing computation closer to the source of data generation. Our mission is to build a future where a company's valuable data and intellectual property remain entirely private, enabling the deployment of large-scale AI models directly on standard consumer hardware without compromising the information embedded within those models. We are developing an end-to-end platform that is secure, scalable, and fully under the control of our users, empowering enterprises with AI that understands their unique business. We are a team driven by truth, ownership, tenacity, and humility, and we seek individuals who resonate with these core values and are passionate about shaping the next generation of AI. About the Role: We’re looking for a Lead iOS Engineer to own and elevate our iOS application—from architecture and performance to on-device ML inference and delightful, high-fidelity UI. You’ll lead technical direction, set quality bars, and mentor engineers while building a fast, reliable, offline-first product experience. This is a hands-on role: you’ll ship code, review code, and make the hard calls that keep the app smooth, scalable, and maintainable.

Requirements

6+ years of professional iOS development experience, including significant ownership of a production iOS app.
Strong expertise in Swift and SwiftUI, with demonstrated ability to build complex, high-performance interfaces.
Deep understanding of iOS performance: Instruments, Time Profiler, memory leaks, frame pacing, rendering costs, concurrency, and energy impact.
Experience building offline-first mobile apps: persistence layers, background tasks, sync engines, and reliability under poor network conditions.
Familiarity with Metal (or strong graphics/GPU optimization instincts) and when to apply it.
Practical experience shipping on-device ML features using CoreML (and/or related inference runtimes), including model lifecycle and optimization considerations.
Strong software engineering fundamentals: architecture patterns, testability, maintainability, and thoughtful API design.
Proven leadership: driving technical direction, mentoring, and making pragmatic tradeoffs to ship.

Nice To Haves

Experience with MLX or modern on-device ML toolchains (quantization, distillation, model compression, latency tuning).
Experience building advanced animations or custom rendering (Core Animation, Metal shaders, SwiftUI performance tuning).
Experience with secure local storage, encryption at rest, and privacy-sensitive mobile features.
Background in real-time systems, graphics pipelines, or compute-heavy mobile workloads.

Responsibilities

iOS technical leadership: Define architecture, engineering standards, and delivery practices for a high-quality iOS codebase.
Build best-in-class Swift/SwiftUI experiences: Create polished, responsive UI with strong state management, clean composition, and modular design.
Performance & animation excellence: Ensure buttery-smooth interactions (scrolling, transitions, gestures), optimize render pipelines, and aggressively reduce jank, dropped frames, and memory pressure. Obsess about the animation and performance.
On-device inference optimization: Implement and optimize ML inference pipelines with a focus on latency, battery, thermal limits, memory usage, and throughput.
CoreML / MLX integration: Build reliable inference flows using CoreML and modern ML stacks (including MLX where appropriate), managing model formats, quantization strategies, and runtime constraints.
Metal-enabled acceleration: Use Metal (and related GPU tooling) to accelerate graphics or computation where it meaningfully improves user experience and performance.
Offline-first architectures: Design robust offline flows with local persistence, sync strategies, conflict resolution, and resilient background behavior.
Observability & quality: Establish performance monitoring, crash/error reporting, regression testing, and release processes that keep quality high as the product scales.
Cross-functional collaboration: Partner closely with product, design, and backend to translate goals into crisp technical plans and deliver reliably.
Mentor and raise the bar: Coach iOS engineers through pairing, code reviews, and thoughtful guidance; drive a culture of craftsmanship and velocity.