Our Creative Technology Group (CTG) is a research and development studio, prototyping forward-thinking experiences that leverage emerging technologies to advance our company's global marketing communications. This nimble, multi-disciplinary team of creative technologists, artists, and designers works together to drive innovation in rapidly evolving fields such as spatial and generative computing. We partner with teams across the company to evolve how we work with emerging technologies to improve our internal workflows and customer facing experiences.
Description
As Senior Developer you will own the end-to-end technical vision and design direction of a native macOS application built in Swift. You'll be responsible for both a high-performance AppKit application and a Vapor-based backend delivering real-time collaboration over WebSockets. This is a hands-on role demanding deep systems-level macOS engineering expertise, where you will write code daily, architect new features, and prototype. You'll work closely with product owners and creative teams to evolve the application into the definitive review and collaboration tool for.our marketing and communications group.
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design and development of a macOS application used daily across hundreds of creatives and team leads.
- Design and implement high-performance, custom AppKit views and controls, including bespoke layout engines, canvas-based rendering and multi-user collaboration tools.
- Own the full-stack: develop and maintain both the Swift client application and the Vapor/NIO server backend, including WebSocket-based real-time synchronization and incremental state patching.
- Create original interaction designs and high-fidelity prototypes that push the boundaries of what a native macOS application can feel like, informed by deep knowledge of our company's Human Interface Guidelines.
- Architect scalable, real-time collaboration systems including networking protocols, conflict resolution strategies and efficient binary/JSON serialization.
- Drive technical direction and make pragmatic architectural decisions, balancing innovation with reliability for a production system depended on by creative teams.
- Manage deployment pipelines, code signing workflows and server infrastructure for macOS application distribution using tools like Sparkle.
- Collaborate closely with product owners, designers and stakeholders across our department to translate creative vision into shipped software.
- Identify and resolve complex performance bottlenecks across rendering, layout, networking and serialization layers.
Qualifications
- 10 or more years of professional experience developing native macOS applications with Swift and AppKit.
- Deep expertise in AppKit fundamentals: NSView lifecycle, the responder chain, NSEvent handling, CALayer/Core Animation, custom drawing and hit testing.
- Strong server-side Swift experience, ideally with Vapor and Swift NIO, including WebSocket communication and RESTful API design.
- Experience building real-time collaborative or networked applications with low-latency synchronization requirements.
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning, debugging and optimizing model performance through experimentation.
- Familiarity with generative AI coding tools.
- Deep subject matter technical expert, paired with high level of curiosity and eagerness to learn.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience as a technical lead or sole developer on a production application, comfortable owning the full development lifecycle from concept through deployment.
- Background in reactive programming paradigms (Combine, ReactiveKit, RxSwift).
- Experience with Metal Framework and writing Metal Shaders for visual effects, custom filters, and real-time 3D graphics.
- Strong visual design sensibility with experience prototyping and iterating on interaction design for desktop applications.
- Degree in Computer Science, Design, Human-Computer Interaction or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.
Hours may fluctuate based on project needs.
