Founding Mobile Engineer

The Mission

1.5 billion people are actively trying to learn a new language right now. Almost all of them will fail.

Not because they lack motivation — but because the tools are broken. Flashcard apps teach you to recognize words you’ll never use in conversation. Grammar drills bore you into quitting. And the one method that actually works — comprehensible input — has never been turned into a product that feels effortless to start.

The science is clear. Stephen Krashen’s research on language acquisition — the most well-supported theory in the field — shows that humans acquire language the same way they learned their first: not through grammar rules and vocabulary lists, but through understanding real messages in context. Immersion. Native content. Natural acquisition. It’s how every child on earth learns to speak, and it’s how adults learn best too. Read the paper here https://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf

Other apps have tried to build around this method. They all make it too hard to start. They throw you into the deep end, expect you to figure it out, and most people bounce before they ever feel the magic.

Parrot is the fix. We take real native video content — the stuff people actually watch — and turn it into an immersive learning experience with interactive subtitles, AI-driven activities, and personalized paths that adapt to each learner. We’re making the best method trivially easy to begin. You open the app, watch a video you enjoy, and you’re learning. That’s it. That’s the product.

We launched months ago and thousands of learners are already hooked. Growth is accelerating. We’re backed by Y Combinator (F25) and building out of San Francisco. The founding team is 3 co-founders. You would be our first engineering hire.

The Role

You will own the entire app. Every screen, every button, every feature that ships — that’s yours. This isn’t “join the mobile team.” You are the mobile team.

You’ll work directly with the founders to figure out what to build, then make it real. No one hands you a spec and walks away. You’ll understand the problem, build the solution, test it ruthlessly, ship it to production, and watch real learners use it — all in the same week.

Our app is iOS-first, built in React Native with native Swift modules where performance demands it. You’ll be deep in animations, scroll performance, video playback, and interactive UI that needs to feel buttery at 60fps. This is a consumer product where every frame matters — where the difference between “good” and “magical” is the difference between a user who churns and one who tells all their friends.

You’re joining a product-obsessed team that operates under radical transparency and zero egos. The best idea with the best data wins — doesn’t matter who said it. We move fast, we talk straight, and we hold each other to an extremely high bar.

What You’ll Do

• Own and ship mobile features from idea to App Store — fast and reliably
• Build beautiful, fluid, interactive experiences that make people say “how did they do that”
• Obsess over performance — profile, optimize, and make every interaction hit 60fps
• Test ruthlessly — catch bugs before users do, write tests that matter, and trace issues through the stack when they slip through
• Ship to production daily — our pace is fast, our deploys are frequent, and our bar is high
• Shape the product alongside the founders — you’re not implementing tickets, you’re deciding what gets built
• Use AI to move at 10x speed — every engineer gets unlimited AI tokens and we expect you to push the limits of AI-assisted development

What We’re Looking For

• 2+ years building and shipping mobile apps professionally (iOS strongly preferred). You’ve had a real job where you shipped real code to real users. This is not a new grad role.
• Deep love for frontend craft — you obsess over animations, transitions, scroll feel, and the smallest UX details
• You understand rendering performance under the hood — you reach for the profiler before guessing, and you actually enjoy reading flame charts
• Strong testing instincts — you think about what can break before it breaks, and when bugs land, you trace them fast and fix them right
• You ship fast without shipping broken — speed and reliability are not tradeoffs for you, they’re both the standard
• High ownership — you don’t wait to be told what to build. You see the problem, scope the solution, and ship it.

We Particularly Like People Who

• Have built something they’re proud of — a side project, an app, a startup, anything that shows you build because you can’t not build
• See where the puck is going with AI — you’re already using AI tools daily and thinking about what engineering looks like in 2 years
• Care about the mission — you’ve learned (or are learning) a second language and know firsthand how broken the current tools are
• Are low-ego and high-output — you care more about what ships than who gets credit
• Want to be on a team where every engineer spends their entire salary in AI tokens each year — and thinks that’s obvious, not controversial

Why Parrot

• Ground floor — the team is 3 co-founders. You’re the first engineer.
• 0.5% to 2.0% equity depending on experience.
• YC F25 backed — with strong traction and growing fast
• AI-native team — unlimited tokens, AI agents in our workflow, pushing the frontier of what a small team can ship
• San Francisco office in Pac Heights — in-person, high-energy, building together
• $180K–$220K base salary + equity

Your Career Starts Here

This is engineer #1 at a company that’s just getting started. There’s no existing team to slot into, no org chart above you, no ceiling on where this goes.

The people who join at this stage don’t stay “mobile engineer.” As the team grows, they become the ones who set the technical direction, define the engineering culture, and lead the people who come after them. Your scope and responsibility will grow as fast as the company does — and we’re growing fast.

If you’ve ever wanted to look back and say “I built that from the ground up” — this is that moment.

We don’t hire for resumes. We hire builders — people who’ve made something real, who care about craft, and who want to do the best work of their career at a pace most teams can’t keep up with.

This isn’t for everyone. But if you’re reading this and something in you just lit up — we should talk.

Technologies we use

• React Native (Expo), Expo Router, React Native Reanimated
• TypeScript
• Swift (native iOS modules)
• Go (backend)
• PostgreSQL
• Temporal
• Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, custom AI agents
• Xcode, React Native dev tools, Flipper, platform debuggers, network inspectors
• Git, GitHub Actions, EAS, Docker
• Legend State, TanStack React Query
• RevenueCat (subscriptions), PostHog (analytics), Sentry (error tracking)

You don’t need to know all of these. Your focus is frontend mobile — but as a founding engineer, you’ll be expected to work across the stack when needed.

TN Visa and H1B transfer visa (if already in US) OK. No other visa options.

Interview Process

1. Prescreen
2. 1 hour app build
3. 4 hour in office build + Lunch with the team