Role Overview

The lead iOS Engineer is a strong IC who is also the technical authority and primary shipper for our Ethena Pay app, the primary way users spend, send and grow their money. You’ll own the app end-to-end: building, signing, and releasing it at a quality bar fit for a money app, in both engineering rigor and visual craft. In a consumer money app, polish is trust, so the app needs to feel fast, fluid, and pixel-perfect, using modern iOS design (Liquid Glass, SF Symbols, Dynamic Type).

Every iOS question routes through you. You’ll own the passkey/WebAuthn auth surface and the App Store release pipeline, and set the direction the rest of mobile grows in. This is a hands-on role with real decision authority: the app ships on your word, and you set the bar for how it’s built.

Role Responsibilities

• Be the top contributor. Write and ship the majority of the Ethena Pay app yourself — the hardest surfaces, the critical path, the polish — as the most productive hands-on developer on the team, not a lead who reviews from the sidelines.

• Own the native iOS app end-to-end — architecture, build, and quality bar — across both engineering rigor and visual craft.

• Coordinate the App Store release pipeline: certificates, provisioning profiles, entitlements, associated domains, and TestFlight/App Store submission.

• Own core app surfaces with full design authority, keeping each legible, documented, and easy for the team to build on.

• Raise the iOS quality and visual-craft bar, enforce a test strategy in review, and close UI/polish gaps against the Liquid Glass design language.

• Act as the default reviewer and decision-maker on iOS, mentoring the team and setting the technical standard others build against.

• Set mobile direction and drive the roadmap, laying the foundation a phase-2 Android hire and future iOS engineers will build on.

Required Skills and Experience

• Shipped and maintained native iOS apps handling real money or sensitive financial/crypto data, from a world-class consumer app where design is a competitive advantage (Revolut, Monzo, Cash App, Robinhood, Coinbase, or a design-led crypto app).

• Strong Swift + SwiftUI — modern concurrency (async / await, actors), state and navigation architecture, performance, and memory; you ship polished, reliable UI.

• A track record of visually excellent, pixel-perfect apps — you can point to shipped apps (App Store links / portfolio) that look and feel great, are faithful to design down to the detail, and use motion and haptics well. You work hand-in-hand with designers (Figma) and hold the line on craft. Hands-on with the modern iOS design language, including Liquid Glass (iOS 26)

• You've integrated the classes of SDK a money app relies on — several of: passkeys / WebAuthn (ASAuthorization), embedded-wallet / auth infra (Privy, or Dynamic / Turnkey / Magic), WalletConnect / Reown, a KYC SDK (SumSub, Onfido, Persona), account funding / aggregation (Mesh, or Plaid-class), and push / attribution (Firebase, AppsFlyer).

• Secure on-device handling — Keychain, biometric gating, and disciplined avoidance of token/PII leakage to logs or analytics.

• Comfortable owning and evolving a large existing iOS codebase, with the judgment to set technical direction.

• You're agent-native. You wield agentic development — coding agents (e.g. Claude Code), MCP servers, reusable skills — as a force multiplier, and can explain where it does and doesn't apply on iOS work. Fluent, not a dabbler; you verify output.