Software Engineer, Compiler

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.

About the Role

At The Browser Company, we've taken a unique approach to building our Swift/Chromium web browsers for multiple platforms. While most major browsers are written in C++, we decided to avoid challenges around slow iteration speed and memory safety by building Arc and Dia using Swift. A small team of language compiler and systems engineers have implemented the protocol that allows us to run our Swift code across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android. We’re part of the Swift core team and work closely with Apple, supporting Windows and Android. You can read more about our open source work on our company Github and our Speaking in Swift blog.

As a Compiler Engineer at The Browser Company, you'll advance Windows support for Swift and build features that benefit both our internal projects and the broader Swift community. Your work will shape how we build browsers and cross-platform applications, with Swift at the core of our stack. You'll collaborate with the open-source community, Apple, and other companies using Swift while tackling deep technical challenges in language and compiler design.

Overall you will

• Enhance Compiler Performance: Investigate and address performance bottlenecks, focusing on areas like memory allocation, PGO/LTO/BOLT, and hot function optimizations. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to improve build times and developer productivity.

• Platform Support: Maintain and expand support for multiple operating systems, including Windows and Android. This includes enabling CI testing, debugging tools, and profiling capabilities to ensure robust toolchain performance. Maintain and improve support for multiple architectures including X86_64 and ARM64 across different Operating Systems. Be involved in emerging architecture support as well (e.g. RISCV).

• Toolchain Development: Build and maintain custom toolchains on macOS and Windows, ensuring seamless integration with tools like Xcode and VSCode. Develop deployment solutions for alternative toolchains to enhance developer workflows. Work to support new platforms for cross-compilation and improve existing ones across the compilation pipeline.

• Cross-Language Interoperability: Drive innovations in Swift and C/C++, Java/Kotlin interoperability, enabling seamless integration for Windows and Android application development. Improve Swift's interoperability with C and C++ codebases to improve developer experiences with multi-lingual codebases.

• Open Source by Default: Nearly all of your work lands upstream in LLVM, Swift, and related projects. Your contributions are visible, impactful, and benefit the wider developer community.

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 Swift, our Windows toolchain and tooling, and our Windows roadmap

• Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our codebase and tooling

• Pair programmed with a few people on the engineering team

• Be regularly posting product feedback about our browser in our #dogfooding channel

After 3 months you will...

• Be familiar with our Windows toolchain, our Swift bindings, and how the Swift compiler works on Windows

• Shipped several tickets to improve Swift language features and Swift developer tooling

• Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more.

• Be involved in infrastructure discussions like how we add better observability to debug issues in production, how we better monitor performance regressions, and how we make our updater less finicky.

After 6 months you will...

• Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at The Browser Company.

• Be driving compiler and toolchain projects from conception to production launch

• Be mentoring and pair programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase.

• Be working closely with Apple and the LLVM and Swift communities to discuss new features and push these projects forward

Qualifications

• Compiler experience. You have 5+ years of experience working with language compilers and complex codebases, such as LLVM. Ideally, you've worked with Swift and/or C++.

• Operating system experience. Some familiarity with one of our operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS) is preferred, but not required.

• A passion for build systems and tooling. 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.

• Pragmatism and problem-solving. You're pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.

• You're time zone overlaps with our team. We're primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have at least 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

• You resonate with our company values.

Compensation and Benefits

• Our total compensation for full-time employees includes base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. The annual base salary range for this role is $295,000 - $350,000 USD. The final offer will depend on your experience, expertise, and interview performance. Our goal is simple: if it feels like the right mutual fit, compensation shouldn’t be the thing that gets in the way. We’ve built a small, talent-dense team who cares deeply about their craft, and we pay competitively in line with current market benchmarks.

• Benefits. We offer best-in-class benefits (https://go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits) designed to support you, your family, and your life outside of work. Think big-company perks with startup-style impact, ownership, and ways of working — so you have the space and support to do the best work of your career.

• Location. We’re a remote-friendly company and can hire in the US or Canada. If you live in New York (or want to visit), you’re welcome to work from our office in Williamsburg.

The Browser Company is an ambitious team of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, New York. We strongly support diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. 

🚙 To read more about what we value as a company, check out Notes on Roadtrips on our blog.