Designer-Engineer · Apple Platforms

Grateful Labs LLC; Ashburn (VA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in product

Creative freedom on design

Job summary

Grateful Labs LLC in Ashburn, Virginia is looking for a versatile designer who codes to enhance user experience across iOS, Apple Watch, and Mac. Candidates should have production experience with Swift and swift insights into Apple’s design principles.

You will focus on developing an iOS app, an Apple Watch app, and Mac widgets that embody a cohesive design spirit. This role emphasizes thoughtful design and user engagement over metrics, along with the opportunity for equity in the product.

Qualifications

• Fluent in Swift and SwiftUI.
• Experience shipping a real iOS app to production.
• Knowledge of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

Responsibilities

• Develop the iOS app, focusing on motion and haptics.
• Create an Apple Watch app with meaningful complications.
• Design Mac widgets that enhance user experience.

Skills

Swift

SwiftUI

Human Interface Guidelines

WidgetKit

watchOS complications

ActivityKit

Job description

A designer who codes, or an engineer who designs — the line doesn't matter. What matters is that you can hold the whole experience in your head: the way a glance complication should feel on the wrist, the way a widget rests on a Mac desktop, the way the iPhone app breathes in the hand. And you can build it yourself in Swift.

You're fluent in Swift and SwiftUI. You've shipped a real iOS app to production — not a course project. You know Apple's Human Interface Guidelines well enough to know when to follow them and when the practice we're building demands a quieter, slower deviation. You probably have opinions about haptics, motion curves, and font metrics, and you can defend those opinions in code reviews.

Bonus: production experience with WidgetKit, watchOS complications, Live Activities, ActivityKit, Liquid Glass, or whatever recent Apple surface has caught your attention. Bonus on top of bonus: you've built something cross-Apple-platform before and the three surfaces actually felt like one product.

What you'd work on

• The iOS app itself — its motion, its haptics, the way each meditation arrives, holds, and ends.
• An Apple Watch app and complication that turns a wristwatch into a quiet reminder to practice — not another notification source. The point is to return attention, not interrupt it.
• Mac widgets that sit at the edge of the desktop the way a candle sits at the edge of a room: present, never insistent.
• The design system that ties all three surfaces together. The Sacred Act needs to feel like one thing across three devices, not three apps with a shared logo.

What I'll bring

• A real product in TestFlight, with users who care and a private community of testers shaping every release.
• A founding engineer to pair with on the boundary between native Swift and the Bun + Hono backend that wraps the AI meditation generation.
• A design language still being shaped — your taste will set its tone for years across iPhone, Watch, and Mac. There is no design team to defer to, and no committee.
• Equity that makes the surfaces you design and ship feel partly yours, because they will be.

What I won't do

• Ask you to ship before the surface feels right. We move slowly on the parts that matter.
• Bury your name behind a generic "engineering" credit. Designer-engineers deserve to be seen as both.
• Build for engagement metrics or compete with the attention economy. The product is meant to return attention to the visitor, not capture it.

If you can show me an Apple surface you've shipped that you're genuinely proud of — and one place in a currently shipping iOS app where you think the design has betrayed the calm it was meant to carry — send an application.