Software Engineer - Engine & Runtime (C++)

Shorebird•San Francisco, CA

7d•Remote

About The Position

Shorebird is seeking a Software Engineer to work on their custom fork of the Flutter engine and Dart SDK. This role involves building and maintaining core components, including an ARM64 interpreter, with a focus on systems-level programming in C++. The engineer will own the Flutter fork, design and ship new capabilities, and have a direct impact on thousands of customers. The team is small, remote, and includes the creator of Flutter.

Requirements

Real facility and real desire for C++
Genuinely productive in C++ and genuinely want to be down here
Ability to tell AI-generated code when it's right or not
A generalist who goes deep, not a narrow specialist
Experience picking up a large codebase you didn't write and making yourself productive in it
Mission alignment: care about the world no longer writing everything twice
Self-directed: thrive in ambiguity and don't need a lot of process to feel comfortable
Drawn to a small company: impact and ownership over structure and scale

Nice To Haves

Prior Flutter or Dart engine experience
Compiler expertise
A graphics background

Responsibilities

Build new features deep in a large, C++ codebase (our Flutter engine + Dart runtime forks)
Own capabilities end to end: design doc, implementation, ship, support
Work as "full stack" as you're comfortable; on a team this small, work divides by interest, not by rigid layer
Work directly with the founder who built Flutter
Take on unglamorous work like rebases after Flutter releases, occasional gnarly native bugs, and build-infra fixes
Design and ship new capabilities down in the Flutter engine and Dart runtime, in C++
Own our Flutter fork, including how it's built, managed and maintained
Use systems-layer skills to take our Flutter fork further than Google's
Improve our updater (rust) package
Teach our Flutter fork to build debug builds
Implement hot restart (making our update mechanism play nice with in-process restart rather than a full process restart)
Implement zero-config crash reporting and/or in-production profiling
Explore improvements to our custom Dart compiler, interpreter and linker
Explore new features like native build caching for Flutter/Dart