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.
We are seeking someone who'll pair closely with our designer, but also can make design and product decisions within the bounds of our design system to elevate the experience as a whole and bring it to a strong baseline from what feels like a mostly frankensteined experience today.
The work
This is a role with real ownership of the surfaces that define how Shelf feels.
The marquee work, in flight or upcoming:
Define and ship the iOS moments that become Shelf's signature. The Live Activity that quietly tracks what you're currently watching, reading, or listening to. The lockscreen widget that becomes a daily ritual. The App Clip that lets a friend add something to your shelf in two taps. These are surfaces being designed in collaboration, not handed down.
Lead the manual item search and addition flow as a craft surface, not a form. This is one of the most-touched paths in the app. The bar is "feels native to iOS in 2026," not "works."
Own tap handlers, transitions, and interaction polish on insight surfaces. Weekly recap, micro-app experiences, category and item pages. The places where motion is the product.
Supporting work, alongside the marquee:
Brand integration across the app as the new visual system rolls deeper
Profile view refinements
Polish where they materially raise the bar (completion edge cases, font and styling consistency)
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 know when to reach for App Clips, widgets, Live Activities, gesture recognizers, custom transitions, and when not to. 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 joinus@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.