Designer-Engineer: Build a Cross-Platform, Calm iOS App

Grateful Labs LLC; Ashburn (VA); On-site; Full time

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.