Mobile & Extension Engineer

The owner of the iPhone - the Safari extension and the Apple Wallet passes that put a verified code in a shopper's hand at the moment of checkout, end to end.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping - the intelligence that tells you what's actually true about a product, including when not to buy. SimplyCodes is our first proof at scale: the code verification service that shows shoppers codes that actually work, around $22M in revenue at roughly 60% margins. We are 100% founder-owned, profitable, and bootstrapped since 2009 - no outside investors, no board. A small team - fewer than twenty operators - outbuilding companies 10x our size.

Why This Role Exists

Most shopping on a phone happens in the browser and at the checkout page - not inside a downloaded app. We tried the app. We killed it. The lane that matters is Safari and the Wallet, and today we own neither.

The iPhone is our largest unbuilt surface. This seat builds it. You own the Safari extension that surfaces a verified code at checkout inside iOS Safari, and the Apple Wallet passes that keep a claimed code in the shopper's pocket until they need it. End to end - from the WebKit quirk to the App Store listing, you are the person who ships it.

This is a founding individual-contributor seat, not a manager with a mobile team to build. You direct AI agents and work beside a handful of elite operators. Your leverage is what you ship and own, not the headcount beneath you.

The System You'll Need to Model

• Safari Web Extensions look like Chrome's Manifest V3 extensions and behave like neither. The same code that runs in Chrome breaks in quiet ways under WebKit, Apple's browser engine, and Apple's extension APIs trail the open standard. Porting is not a translation - it is a rebuild against a moving target.
• An Apple Wallet pass is a signed bundle, not a web page. Updates push through Apple's servers, not yours. Designing a claimed code as a pass means reasoning about signing, expiry, relevance triggers, and what happens when the code changes after it is already in the pocket.
• At checkout, milliseconds decide whether the shopper sees the code before they pay, and trust decides whether they use it. A verified code that arrives a beat too late is worthless. A code we cannot stand behind is worse than none. Speed and trust are the same problem here.
• Every real checkout the extension touches is a signal: which codes worked, which stores changed, which fields moved. That data feeds our verification fleet - the checkout robots that test codes at scale - so the extension is not only a consumer surface, it is a sensor that makes the whole truth engine sharper.
• Apple decides whether your work ships. Review timelines, extension entitlements, and privacy rules are not paperwork - they are a design constraint you model from day one, because a feature that cannot pass review does not exist.
• You work inside Cortex, the shared AI brain that runs the company and is the product family we sell. Every operator works through governed AI sessions, and the substrate answers its own questions from a base of more than 8,600 documents. You are inside the product, not adjacent to it.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The Safari extension. The verified-code experience inside iOS Safari, from the first WebKit port to the shipped App Store listing. Agents write code alongside you; you own the architecture, the verdict on what ships, and the quality bar the shopper feels.
• Apple Wallet. Claimed codes as Wallet passes - signing, updates, expiry, and the moment a shopper pulls one out at the register. You decide what a pass a shopper trusts actually looks like.
• The checkout moment. The end-to-end experience at the point of purchase: speed, correctness, and trust. When a code is wrong, that is your bug to catch before the shopper ever sees it.
• The sensor loop. The data the extension sends back to the verification fleet, and the interface between what the phone learns at real checkouts and what the truth engine knows.
• Your seat, in writing. Within your first quarter you co-sign a seat charter: one number that proves the extension works - say, the share of eligible iPhone checkouts where a verified code reaches the shopper - that a script can check without asking anyone, plus a written split of what you decide freely and what you propose. This is the model we run.

Who You Are

You reverse-engineer systems that do not document themselves. Given a browser that behaves differently than its own spec, you build a working model from observed behavior and update it fast when the model is wrong. You reason from first principles when the docs run out - which, on Safari and Wallet, is often.

You ship end to end and verify what your agents hand back. Agents are your production system; you treat their output as something you check against a real device, not something you accept on faith. You can build the whole thing by hand and prove it, and that mastery is exactly what lets you trust - or reject - what an agent produces. The expensive thing here is a redo cycle, never the compute.

You have shipped software that lives on real iPhones - an app in the store, a browser extension people installed, a Wallet pass someone actually used. You are fluent in Swift and WebKit and comfortable in JavaScript and TypeScript, because the extension lives in both worlds. You have fought the Chrome-to-Safari port or the App Store review queue and won. We care about what you shipped and how you reasoned about it, not where you did it or what your degree says.

Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you are an iOS specialist who will not touch the JavaScript side, or a web developer who will not learn Swift - the lane is both, and it is yours whole. It is wrong if you want a famous consumer app with a download counter for your resume; we killed the app, and this is the unglamorous surface where shopping actually happens. It is wrong if you need a spec handed to you and a manager to unblock you - you own the outcome, and the browser will not tell you how it works. You will be happiest here if you want to own the iPhone end to end and be measured on what ships.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional engineering interviews. Every stage is demonstrated performance on work-relevant tasks.

Async video screen. Brief and async - 5 to 6 questions, about 15 minutes. We want to see how you think, not how you present.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with key members of the team.

Conversation with the founder. How you model systems, where you push back, and whether you can hold a technical argument live.

Paid work trial. A paid four-day build trial - real work in our real environment, a live piece of the extension or a Wallet pass taken from problem to shipped-and-verified. We watch four things: how you get grounded, how you decompose the problem, how you verify what your agents produce, and whether your self-assessment is honest. It is paid because it respects your time, and because generous pay filters for the high-agency people we want.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the artifact and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $375,000 - $450,000 (base plus equity plus profit sharing). Base: $250,000 - $300,000 - top of market for this seat.

Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at a $0 strike, real ownership from day one, capital-gains treatment; annual pro-rata profit sharing from free cash flow; annual tender liquidity; 100% family premium coverage; effectively unlimited token budget, steered by ROI, never capped.

This is a partnership structure, built to mint partners. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles - in person, five days a week. The rooms are real rooms.