AI-First iOS Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +11 more states.

📋 Description

• Direct a team of AI coding agents simultaneously to design, develop, test, and deploy iOS features using Swift, UIKit, and increasingly, SwiftUI.

• Assume complete ownership of a segment of the iOS application — including discovery, scoping, architecture, implementation, quality assurance, release, monitoring, and iteration.

• Implement an "engineer-as-a-team" workflow — initiate agents for specification drafting, code generation, test generation, code review, refactoring, documentation, and bug triage, then merge, evaluate, and deploy.

• Formulate and advocate for a robust perspective on high-quality iOS code within Grove's architecture (View Controllers + ViewState value types, AppController/Coordinator patterns, protocol-driven Services and Data Managers, Combine, and modularized via local Swift Packages) to critically assess AI outputs and reject those that do not meet our standards.

• Create prompts, evaluations, and tools that standardize AI-assisted mobile development, making it consistent and measurable rather than artisanal.

• Establish automation that completes the loop: Fastlane lanes, CircleCI checks, TestFlight distribution, device test farms, telemetry-driven rollbacks, and AI-powered review gates.

• Influence architectural decisions with AI as a research and prototyping collaborator — explore multiple options in a day rather than one in a week, particularly during the UIKit to SwiftUI transition.

• Collaborate with fellow engineers on architecture and trade-offs — present designs for review prior to deployment. Gather business context from product managers, designers, and platform engineers; avoid isolated assumptions.

• Take independent responsibility for production health — monitor Sentry, Datadog, Cloudflare, and Firebase to evaluate system health, triage incidents, and adjust your backlog without prompting. You prioritize the queue; you do not wait for direction on what needs attention.

• Mentor the Heady contractor team on AI-native workflows and share insights with mobile colleagues.

⛳️ Requirements

• 5–8 years of professional iOS development experience with a portfolio demonstrating shipped consumer applications at scale.

• Native, demonstrable proficiency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, agentic workflows) — you can walk us through a feature you delivered where AI handled the majority of coding while you orchestrated the efforts.

• Strong, discerning taste in Swift, UIKit, and SwiftUI, with experience leading UIKit to SwiftUI migrations on an actual application (not just a greenfield demo).

• Comfortable navigating repositories that utilize Coordinator/AppController patterns, protocol-driven Services and Data Managers, and value-type ViewModels — and prepared to make pragmatic decisions about which patterns to preserve and which to phase out.

• Experience working with JSON:API-style backends (sideloaded relationships, sparse fieldsets) and Shopify storefront/checkout APIs at a consumer scale.

• A penchant for owning complete outcomes rather than passing off work at team boundaries — coupled with the discernment to know when to involve another engineer for an architecture review or business-context assessment.

• Truly autonomous in operation: you independently review Sentry/Datadog/Firebase/Cloudflare dashboards, prioritize your own tasks, and do not require a manager to highlight urgent issues.

• Proficient in crafting prompts, evaluations, and guardrails — you view AI as a system to be engineered, not merely a search tool.

• Strong written communication skills — articulate specifications clearly, conduct thorough reviews, and explain decisions to your teammates. You will lead asynchronous standups, design reviews, and Slack debugging sessions with a distributed team.

• A collaborative and humble attitude — orchestrators excel when they prioritize outcomes over personal recognition and welcome constructive design critiques from peers.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive benefits - medical, vision, dental

• Equity - shared success is core to our mission

• Flexible Paid Time Off - we care most about results

• Free VIP membership and 50% employee discount

• Working for a company that believes a small group of individuals can positively impact the world by creating products and funding initiatives that benefit the planet!