iOS Craft Engineer (Remote/Contract)

koodos
koodos

Software Engineering

Posted on May 1, 2026
Apply now

Remote · Part-time, project-based · Competitive rate, with equity available for ongoing relationships · Could convert to full-time role in NYC

Why koodos labs

koodos labs is a consumer AI research and product company building toward a future where the internet knows you and can do things for you, on your terms. Read about the co-founders and their story here. We’ve raised 3 (unannounced) rounds from the world’s leading investors, and our Board is comprised of Pinterest’s co-founder, Facebook’s first head of monetization and a leading GP.

What We're Building

Shelf is used by millions of people to track what they're watching, reading, and listening to, and to keep up with what others are into. It connects to your favorite platforms, gives you back insights from your behavior, and will soon let you share that context with services to enable personalized intelligence on your own terms.

The Opportunity

Shelf is now native iOS. We moved off Capacitor onto Swift/SwiftUI specifically to chase the things that make iOS feel like iOS. Gestures that read your intent. App Clips. Widgets and Live Activities that do real work on the lockscreen. Motion that anticipates the touch. The kind of frame-by-frame craft that separates apps people use from apps people love.

We have strong design taste leading our system and strong architecture leading the harder iOS surfaces. What we're missing is the person who lives at the seam between them. Someone who treats a 50ms hitch as a bug, who can look at a Rive transition and know whether it should be eased differently, and who ships features that feel inevitable on the platform.

This role exists to elevate the interaction quality and polish of key native iOS surfaces in partnership with design and engineering.

How We Work

This role operates at the intersection of design and engineering. You’ll work closely with design and engineering to shape and ship polished native experiences.

We’re looking for someone who can take an experience, riff on it, propose strong solutions and implementation directions while working within an evolving product and visual system — not someone looking to reinvent the app from scratch.

You’ll have meaningful autonomy within the surfaces you own, while collaborating closely through critique and review loops. Final product and visual direction sits with design, while technical implementation quality and architecture are reviewed with engineering. You’ll report to our lead designer and collaborate closely with our lead frontend engineer to make sure the work and the value gets into users hands.

The Work

  • Elevate the interaction quality and polish of Shelf’s most important native iOS surfaces. You care deeply about responsiveness, motion, gesture behavior, transitions, haptics, and the small implementation details that make a product feel intentional and rich.
  • Partner closely with our lead designer and engineering to turn product directions into polished, high-craft experiences. You’re comfortable working from rough concepts, evolving specs, or partially-defined systems and helping sharpen them through implementation.
  • Own the implementation quality of interaction-heavy surfaces across the app. You know when motion clarifies the experience, when it distracts, and how to make interfaces feel fast, tactile, and coherent.
  • Contribute to platform-native moments across iOS — widgets, Live Activities, App Clips, transitions, and other surfaces where the platform itself becomes part of the product experience.

    • Stack

    Swift/SwiftUI on iOS and Kotlin/Compose on Android for the clients, TypeScript on Hono for the backend, Postgres (via Supabase) as our data store and Snowflake as our analytical warehouse. We use Cloudflare on the backend - with AWS for the heavier data plumbing. For analytics and observability we use Amplitude, Statsig, Sentry, and Grafana Cloud.

    Who We're Looking For

    The kind of iOS engineer who has a TestFlight history, a personal app or two on the App Store, and strong opinions about haptics. Specifically:

  • Shipped Swift/SwiftUI work you're proud of. Indie apps, side projects, or features inside larger apps where the polish was visibly yours. Bonus if any of it has been featured on the App Store, won awards, or earned a following for its craft.
  • A design engineer's eye. You think in motion and density, not just structure. You can read a Figma file and know which spec is load-bearing and which is the designer's first guess. You spot the third input pattern before you write it.
  • Disciplined inside a system. You move quickly inside an existing codebase without needing to refactor it to your preferences. When you spot tension between a spec and the system, you flag it instead of forking it.
  • Native iOS instincts. you have experience working within the whole iOS experience ecosystem - App Clips, widgets, Live Activities, gesture recognizers, custom transitions. You've built apps where the platform itself was part of the design.
  • AI-native workflow. You ship more with these tools than without them and have opinions about how to wield them.
  • Async-friendly. Comfortable with written communication and weekly check-ins. We don't need you in standups; we do need clear PRs and clear progress.

    • Bonus signals: indie apps on the App Store, content-heavy or social or media app experience, public writing or talks on iOS craft, animation work (Rive, Lottie, custom CA layers), a portfolio site that itself feels designed.

    Logistics

    Remote. Part-time and project-shaped, with flexibility on weekly hours as long as throughput is consistent. Rate band above; for the right person we're open to a monthly retainer plus equity instead. We typically start with one well-scoped paid project so we can calibrate together. If your shipped work makes the answer obvious, we're happy to skip straight to a longer engagement.

    To Apply

    Send links to team@koodos.com. What we want most is the work itself: an App Store link, a TestFlight build, a video of an interaction you're proud of, a personal site. A short note on the most interesting iOS feature you've shipped, what made it hard, and what you'd do differently is helpful but not required if your portfolio already says it. If we already know your work, say so and we'll come to you.

    Apply now
    See more open positions at koodos