Software Engineer, Compiler (Contract)

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

About the Team: 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, led by Saleem Abdulrasool, have implemented the protocol that allows us to run our Swift code across MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

As a Compiler Engineer at The Browser Company, you will focus on advancing Windows support for Swift and developing new features that benefit both our internal projects and the broader Swift community. Your work will directly contribute to our efforts to redefine how browsers and cross-platform applications are built, leveraging Swift as a core part of our technology stack. You’ll have the opportunity to work closely with open-source communities while solving complex technical challenges that have a tangible impact on the future of software development.

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.

• Collaborate with Open Source Communities: Contribute to upstream LLVM, Swift, and related projects, ensuring alignment with industry standards and fostering innovation.

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 the browser in our #dogfooding channel

After 3 months you will...

• Be familiar with our Windows architecture, and be thinking of ways to make product engineers' lives easier when prototyping and building new features.

• 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 projects from conception to production launch.

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

Qualifications

• Compiler experience. You have 4+ 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.

Compensation

This is a part-time independent contractor (1099) position. Compensation for this role is $120-190 per hour dependent on experience. For contractors, there is the potential to convert to full-time.

The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup 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.