Staff Software Engineer, Performance

Posted Aug 6

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
Building a web browser is an extraordinary technical and product undertaking. As a Software Engineer on the Performance Team, you will solve unique architectural and systems challenges to help us achieve our goal of making Arc the fastest browser on the market.
In this role, you’ll come up with creative ways to diagnose common complaints and implement creative ways to improve performance for Arc’s hundreds of thousands of members. Performance engineers here will not be limited to one aspect of the application but will have the agency to understand and prioritize work across our technical stack.
Overall you will...
  • Improve our systems and architecture so that Arc can be more performant in a variety of areas - RAM usage, CPU usage, battery life, interaction speed, and loading performance
  • Collaborate with our Membership, Data, and Engineering teams to understand and triage user-facing performance issues
  • Implement tooling and testing to measure various aspects of performance so that we can make data-informed improvements over time
  • Improve our performance tooling and testing systems so that we can better detect and debug performance issues in production
  • Dive into a large codebase (spanning Swift → Chromium) and understand how we can improve Arc’s performance within a certain part of the technical stack (eg. Swift layer, Chromium rendering path, etc)
After 1 month you will...
  • Get onboarded onto the team and codebase with an onboarding buddy
  • Receive a number of onboarding presentation on how we give each other feedback, the phases a startup goes through, our technical strategy, and more
  • Get familiar with Swift, Chromium, and our development environment
  • Get familiar with our performance tooling and data
  • Have shipped at least one performance improvement in a part of our technical stack
  • Have shipped at least one improvement to our performance tooling
  • Have pair programmed with others on our engineering team
After 3 months you will...
  • Be the point of contact for bugs, regressions, and performance work on a few performance-related work-streams
  • Have identified and shipped a few projects to improve performance, our ability to debug issues, and better track it with data.
  • Have instituted process or tooling for us to prevent some causes of performance issues
  • Have developed in-depth knowledge on classes of performance issues within a certain aspect of performance and/or part of the technical stack
  • Be involved in weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more
  • Be involved and help drive discussions around performance and best practices for writing performant product code with other engineers
  • Have started pairing with other engineers in debugging performance issues in code from other teams
After 6 months you will...
  • Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company, especially performance-related ones
  • Have a major part in defining Browser Company’s technical roadmap as it relates to performance in Arc
  • Help define our strategy for tooling and data as it relates to performance
  • Have identified and shipped significant architectural changes to mitigate classes of performance issues in Arc
  • Actively supporting and mentoring other engineers in identifying performance issues in their code and suggesting tactics for how to resolve them
Qualifications
  • You have 6+ years of experience working on performance or reliability for operating systems or low-level infrastructure. Plus if you’ve worked on: Windows or Chromium-based applications, or web browsers (eg. Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, etc.).
  • You’ve experienced and adopted best practices, tools, and techniques for analyzing, debugging, and improving performance in an application.
  • You’re able to identify and debug issues and make improvements on large, complex codebases that you might not be completely familiar with.
  • You have experience leading critical projects or initiatives within your team and organization.
  • You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.
  • Most of our team are based in North American time zones and require that folks have 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.
  • You resonate with our company values.
Compensation and Benefits
💰 With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to choose the cash-to-equity ratio that best suits their individual needs. Every offer we extend includes three options: a salary-optimized offer, an equity-optimized offer, and a balanced offer.
The annual salary range for this role is $225,000-275,000 USD. The actual salary range offered will vary based on experience level and interview performance.
🧘🏻‍♀️ In addition to a competitive salary and equity package, we provide every employee with the following benefits:
  • comprehensive benefits package with employee medical, dental, and vision. We cover 100% of premiums for employees, 90% for dependents
  • 401k plan
  • flexible vacation policy - on average, our team members take between 15-20 vacation days a year, plus federal holidays (holidays vary by location)
  • remote-friendly working environment - our core working hours are 11 AM-2 PM Eastern Time
  • 12 weeks of paid parental leave
  • $1,500 USD home office stipend
  • Employees based in the US also receive additional services like free annual memberships to One Medical (where available), Talkspace, Teladoc, and HealthAdvocate
The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup of about 85 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work in office in 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.