Staff Engineer, Mobile (React Native)

Staff Engineer, Mobile (React Native)

Photobucket

Help Build the Next Generation of Digital Connection

Photobucket pioneered digital photo hosting. Founded in 2003, the platform now serves more than 70 million users and stores over 13 billion photos and videos. With strong growth and profitable operations, Photobucket has built a durable platform and strong financial foundation.

Now we are building what comes next.

The next evolution of Photobucket is live — a platform designed to redefine how people connect through shared moments. We are creating private digital spaces where real relationships, shared experiences, and authentic communities thrive. And we're just getting started.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to own the technical direction of our mobile platform — leading our Apperture team as Tech Lead, raising the bar for mobile engineering across the organization, and setting the standard for how a senior IC operates at Photobucket.

Our Mission

Empower people to connect through shared moments — safely, simply, and intentionally.

What Makes Photobucket Different

Photobucket is redefining digital connection as the leading photo and video sharing and collaboration platform by creating private spaces where real-world relationships and authentic communities thrive.

Our platform is built on four principles:

• Private by Design — Safe, authentic sharing — your people, your moments, your rules.
• Human at Heart — Designed like a friend — friendly, approachable, and clutter-free.
• Connection with Purpose — Communities built around shared passions, experiences, and relationships.
• Evolving Together — A living platform that grows stronger with every shared moment.

The Opportunity

This is a Staff Engineer role on the IC track. You will own the technical direction of Photobucket's mobile platform, serve as Tech Lead for the Apperture team, and operate as a senior individual contributor whose impact extends beyond a single team.

The Apperture team builds the primary surface through which millions of users experience Photobucket — our React Native mobile applications, with custom native modules, GraphQL APIs, and complementary web experiences. You will be hands-on with the most complex and critical components, but your impact will not be measured in code alone. As a Staff Engineer, you raise the bar for the engineers around you, set patterns that propagate across the engineering organization, and partner with leadership on direction-setting.

We support both individual contributor and management career tracks as first-class at Photobucket. A Staff Engineer operates at equivalent impact and accountability to an Engineering Manager — both are senior leadership roles that simply express their leadership differently. This role is designed for a senior IC who has chosen the IC track deliberately and intends to stay on it.

You will embody the three competencies we expect of every engineer at Photobucket — and set the standard for them on your team:

• Technical craft and judgment. Strong fundamentals — language fluency, system thinking, code quality, operational rigor.
• Product engineering. Engages with the customer problem and partners with Product and UX as a peer.
• AI orchestration. Produces software through whatever method works best — increasingly by writing clear specifications, orchestrating agents, and reviewing AI output with high judgment.

What You'll Own

Mobile Technical Strategy

• Serve as the technical authority for Photobucket's mobile platform
• Set architectural patterns that work in an AI-first development model — patterns that other engineers adopt
• Guide architectural decisions for React Native, native module integration, and the mobile build/release pipeline
• Drive performance optimization, app stability, and mobile-specific concerns — offline behavior, deep linking, push notifications, device fragmentation
• Lead by example through hands-on work on complex or critical components

AI Leadership

• Define how the Apperture team uses AI — the workflows, tooling, spec patterns, and review standards others adopt
• Identify where AI tooling creates real leverage in mobile development and where it doesn't
• Raise the team's spec quality — in an AI-orchestrated workflow, throughput is increasingly bounded by how well problems are translated into specifications that produce correct output
• Model the standard you expect of others

Product Partnership

• Partner with Product Managers and UX as a peer, not a downstream consumer
• Co-create the mobile roadmap; bring engineering insights to product strategy
• Identify high-leverage product opportunities that require technical depth to see
• Push back constructively when specs need work; identify what shouldn't be built

Team Leadership and Bar-Raising

• Raise the technical, product, and AI bar of the engineers around you
• Coach team members on technical craft, AI workflows, and product judgment
• Mentor Senior Engineers and support hiring decisions
• Hold the team accountable through clear expectations and constructive feedback
• Foster a culture where quality is shared responsibility

Delivery and Execution

• Drive on-time delivery while maintaining quality standards
• Own the App Store and Google Play release process — review cycles, staged rollouts, and hotfix strategies
• Break down complex projects into manageable milestones with data-driven estimates
• Proactively communicate risks, blockers, and timeline changes to stakeholders

Operational Excellence

• Monitor app health, crash rates, and performance metrics
• Lead incident response and ensure thorough post-mortems with actionable follow-through
• Identify and address technical debt with clear remediation plans
• Continuously refine team workflows and invest in developer experience

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year you will help:

• Deliver meaningful customer-facing features that delight our customers and grow our userbase
• Build cross-functional trust where Product and Design partners have high confidence in engineering estimates and delivery
• Drive measurable improvement in DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery
• Improve mobile app stability, performance, and release cadence
• Raise the technical, product, and AI bar of the engineers around you — measurable skill development and increasing ownership
• Set patterns for mobile engineering that propagate across the engineering organization
• Establish how the Apperture team uses AI — workflows, tooling, and review patterns that compound the team's output

Who We're Looking For

You are a senior individual contributor who leads through craft, judgment, and demonstrated leverage. You are not a manager who used to code. You are not a Senior Engineer who has been around a long time. You are a Staff Engineer — and you've chosen the IC track because that's where you do your best work.

You are energized by the craft of building great mobile experiences. You set the standard through your own work, and you take personal responsibility for the quality and velocity of what your team ships. Your presence raises the bar of every engineer around you.

Experience

• 10+ years of professional mobile engineering experience
• 3+ years in a Tech Lead role, leading a team through delivery while remaining hands-on
• Demonstrated impact at the Staff level, or sustained leverage at the Senior level that you're ready to extend
• Deep production experience with React Native — not just feature work, but performance optimization, native module bridging, and build/release pipeline ownership
• Strong React and GraphQL skills for the web surfaces that complement the mobile experience
• Proven track record shipping consumer-facing mobile applications at scale
• Experience navigating App Store and Google Play release processes, including review cycles, staged rollouts, and hotfix strategies

Mindset

• Ownership — you treat your team's outcomes as your outcomes
• Bias for action — you identify and resolve issues without waiting to be told
• High standards — you insist on quality and hold your team to the same bar
• Bar-raising — your presence makes the engineers around you better

Nice to Have

• SwiftUI or Kotlin experience for native module development
• Experience with design system implementation on the code side
• Background in consumer photo, social, or media products

Location

Photobucket operates with a distributed workforce with a hub in Boulder, Colorado.

This role is fully remote, with an option to work out of our Boulder, CO office. We work on Mountain Time work hours.

Compensation

• Salary range: $200,000 – $250,000 + bonus
• Health, Dental, Vision Benefits: covering employee/spouse/family premiums 100%
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k) with 100% match up to 5%
• Other health and wellness reimbursements

Why Join Photobucket

We believe the internet needs healthier spaces for connection.

Photobucket is built to bring people together around shared experiences — without the noise, pressure, and algorithms that dominate traditional social media.

We are building something ambitious. And we are looking for people who want to help make it real.

If you're excited about leading the team that builds the mobile experience for how people connect through shared moments — and operating at the Staff level while you do it — we'd love to hear from you.

Photobucket is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.