iOS Engineer (Mid-Senior Level)

About Us

We’re a fast-growing AI startup backed by The Newlands Fund (ex–Sequoia Partners), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Better Capital, Maninder Gulati (CSRO, OYO), Kirti Varun (ex-CPO, Meesho), and many more. We’ve been named one of the top startups where companies spend by a16z. We’re building the interface through which the world will interact with AI – Thine.

With Thine, our vision is to provide an AI with the full context of a person, building a long-term memory and profile that can be used to create an AI that’s truly personal. Our first step toward this vision is an iOS app that captures audio context 24/7, transcribes it, identifies speakers, and ingests the data into our in-house long-term memory system. We then use a retrieval agent to deliver personalized responses in a chat app, so the AI doesn’t give generic answers, but responds based on your life and context.

We are looking for folks who are driven by solving hard technical problems, love what they do and take end to end ownership. This role is not for people who seek work-life balance.

The Role

You’ll own the core iOS experience for Thine, from reliable continuous audio capture and context ingestion to polished interfaces and fluid interactions. We’re a small team with strong experience in AI engineering and LLMs, looking for someone who brings deep knowledge of iOS systems and the craft to turn that technology into an app people love using.

You’ll work close to the operating system: understanding background execution, process termination, and hardware constraints, and making deliberate tradeoffs so an ambient app remains reliable and efficient on real devices. Your ownership extends from architecture and implementation to App Store submission, production monitoring, and helping other engineers ship.

Full-time, in-person in Bengaluru, with a team distributed across India and the US.

What You’ll Do

• Build and own the core iOS app for continuous audio capture, transcription, and context ingestion — the foundation of our AI’s memory.
• Go deep into iOS internals: understand how and why the OS terminates background processes and engineer around those constraints.
• Optimize battery consumption, memory footprint, and CPU usage to keep a 24/7 ambient app viable on real user devices.
• Work with hardware sensors — microphone, motion, and location — and low-level APIs including AudioToolbox, AVFAudio/AVAudioSession, CoreMotion, CoreLocation, and BackgroundTasks.
• Design and implement Liquid Glass interfaces and complex, fluid interactions with Wabi-level craft.
• Own end-to-end features, from architecture discussions through implementation, App Store submission, and production monitoring.
• Write clean, testable, performant code and set practical standards for the iOS codebase.
• Guide and lead other engineers through design and implementation, and own delivery timelines.

Must-Have Skills

• 3–5 years of iOS development experience shipping production apps.
• Strong proficiency in Swift and Objective-C, comfortable reading and writing both and bridging between them.
• Deep understanding of iOS internals: app lifecycle, background execution modes, process termination policies, memory pressure handling, and jetsam.
• Battery and performance optimization expertise: profiling with Instruments (Energy Log, Time Profiler, Allocations), reducing wake-ups, and minimizing CPU/GPU overhead.
• Hands-on experience with audio capture pipelines, CoreMotion, CoreLocation, and managing entitlements and permissions gracefully.
• UI/UX craft: implement complex, polished interactions using UIKit, SwiftUI, Core Animation, and the Liquid Glass design language. You should be able to look at a design like Wabi and ship it.
• Familiarity with networking, concurrency (GCD, async/await, Combine), and on-device data persistence (Core Data, SQLite, or similar).
• Strong Git skills and comfort with shell scripting and CLI tooling.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex system-level issues using crash logs, sysdiagnose, and console logs.
• Curiosity to learn anything technical, from kernel-level scheduling and audio signal processing to new Apple frameworks.
• Use AI effectively for coding and be able to lead other engineers.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with on-device ML (Core ML, Create ML) or speech/audio processing (Speech framework, AVAudioEngine tap pipelines).
• Experience with real-time audio streaming, transcription, or speaker diarization on iOS.
• Familiarity with background-processing edge cases, including BGAppRefreshTask, BGProcessingTask, VoIP pushes, and silent notifications.
• Contributions to open-source iOS libraries or personal projects on GitHub.
• Experience building apps that push the boundaries of background execution on iOS.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity.
• Small team, high velocity, high ownership.
• Working on very hard problems, solutions for which don’t exist — you’ll be pushing iOS to its limits.
• Opportunity to travel to the US and embed in the SF ecosystem.