Hi, we're The Browser Company 👋 and we're building a better way to use the internet. Browsers are unique in that they are one of the only pieces of software that you share with your parents as well as your kids. Which makes sense, they're our doorway to the most important things — through them we socialize with loved ones, work on our passion projects, and explore our curiosities. But on their own, they don’t actually do a whole lot, they’re kind of just there. They don’t help us organize our messy lives or make it easier to compose our ideas. We believe that the browser could do so much more — it can empower and support the amazing things we do on the internet. That’s why we’re building one: a browser that can help us grow, create, and stay curious. To accomplish this lofty task, we’re building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds and experiences. This isn’t optional, it’s crucial to our mission, as we need a wide range of perspectives to challenge our assumptions and shape our browser through a bold, creative lens. With that in mind, we especially encourage women, people of color, and others from historically marginalized groups to apply.

As a Software Engineer, Build Systems at The Browser Company, you will build, maintain, and extend our various build and CI systems, both internally and in open-source repositories. As such, you’ll be thinking about questions like–

• How do we extend our build system to match our needs, improve ergonomics and performance, and manage cost?
• How can we create tooling and scripts to make it easier for engineers to work with our build systems?
• How do we structure our build configuration to make it as maintainable as possible?
• How do we most easily maintain the open source builds we support, such as Apple’s official Swift builds for Windows?
• How do improve the build systems themselves, contributing upstream to SPM, CMake, and other build systems we use?

Overall you will...

• Scope and spearhead technical projects across our Windows, Mac, iOS, Chromium, and Swift toolchain builds and and their respective build systems.
• Improve our build configuration to improve perceived latency, time to completion, cost, and maintainability.
• Leverage technologies like remote caching, distributed compilation, precompiled dependencies and presubmit hooks to improve engineers’ feedback loop.
• Improve the CMake and SPM build systems by pushing improvements upstream, and working with library authors to improve their tooling support.

After 1 month you will...

• Onboard onto our team and codebase with your onboarding buddy
• Attend a number of onboarding presentations on the company, product, codebase, and culture
• Get familiar with our Mac, Windows, and iOS build systems and builds
• Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our build systems
• Have pair programmed with a few people on the engineering team to understand their pain points
• Be regularly posting product feedback about the browser in our #dogfooding channel

After 3 months you will...

• Be familiar with our Windows and Mac dev environment and builds, and be thinking of ways to make product engineers' lives easier by improving our tooling and builds
• Be familiar with our Github Actions and our terraform infrastructure
• Become familiar with our Chromium and Swift toolchain builds, and how we support Apple’s Swift builds on the official Swift repositories
• Shipped a few tickets to improve tooling across our builds
• Contribute to knowledge sharing across the company through engineering presentations, code review, code styling, and more

After 6 months you will...

• Be driving projects from conception to production launch.
• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company.
• Be mentoring and pair programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase.

Qualifications

• You have experience working on complex build systems at companies with 100+ engineers, working across multiple repositories with complex build requirements
• You’re familiar with multiple build systems such as CMake, Bazel, Buck, or MSBuild
• You’re familiar with C++, and have used it in a professional setting
• You're passionate about building tools and systems that make other engineers more productive.
• You understand how to improve systems to make them easier to understand, debug, and maintain.
• You're excited about elegant, maintainable, and easy to use build tooling and configuration.
• You're pragmatic and can see the bigger picture; you're able to reason about prioritization and scope.
• You bias to action. We like learning as quickly as possible, so we embrace failing fast to refine our code, systems, and processes rapidly.

Compensation and Benefits

With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to design their compensation according to their needs. People join startups for different reasons and we want to be accommodating and flexible to everyone’s lives. Every candidate approved for an offer receives two options:

✉️ The first offer is a lower salary with a higher equity package

✉️ The second is a higher salary with a lower equity package.