Firstborn is a creative innovation agency located in New York City. We shape modern brands for a connected future. In 1997, we were founded on the belief that smart ideas and beautifully crafted interactive experiences would move our clients’ businesses forward. Today our focus is broader with a cross-disciplinary digital approach to branding, campaign innovation, content and, true to our roots, rich interactive experiences. Firstborn is a part of Dentsu Inc. Linked by Isobar. 2016 & 2017 Crain's Best Places to Work in NYC.

You will join a team working on creating an ecosystem of highly visual iOS mobile and tablet applications for a high-profile consumer electronics client. You will lead in expanding this platform across new products by developing new architecture, new modules and formats. You’ll lead other iOS Developers, and you will partner with UI designers, 3D artists, and video production teams to create a uniquely designed platform that allows users to interact and virtually experience products before they become available.

As a Principal Mobile Architect, you’ve built multiple applications in Swift, either as a part of a larger team or as an individual lead. You’re up to date with the latest releases of Swift, iOS, and Xcode, and  are interested in exploring new features. You’ve developed apps with custom interfaces with UIKit, and you know your way around debugging tools to sort out visual defects, performance issues, and memory leaks. While you may not have experience as a designer, an appreciation and understanding of the craft is expected. You should be able to create the architecture, define the development approach, set the engineering workflow, and strategize the scalability for the platform. You are able to draw upon your previous experiences to troubleshoot and solve issues as they present themselves.

Please note that candidates will be asked to complete a take-home coding exercise in order to better demonstrate their capabilities.

Key Duties:

• Write consistent clean and readable code and work independently
• Lead a team of iOS developers
• Take ownership of bigger, technically or creatively complex components of a large project from start to finish
• Define the architectural and engineering approach
• Set the engineering workflow for the team
• Strategize the future state of an application to create scale
• Collaborate with members of the creative team to bring designs to life
• Partner with Client Services and Production leads to manage client expectations
• Communicate with client IT Ops
• Help mentor and onboard new developers

• 8-10 years of experience in a software engineering/development role, with at least 6+ years specifically developing iOS applications.
• Have a masterful understanding of core engineering principles and computer science concepts, such as algorithms, data structures, networking, and creating user interfaces
• Experience building mobile applications and familiarity with different architectures/frameworks such as MVC, MVVM, and/or VIPER
• Experience building Universal applications that work across a wide variety of screen sizes and operating systems
• Have built out custom designed user interfaces using code and can translate static design comps into interactive experiences
• Integrated heavy image and/or video assets into a core experience
• Thorough understanding of Git and workflow processes (e.g. GitFlow)
• Thorough testing for performance, memory management, and debugging skills with Xcode tools
• Able to prioritize your own tasks and dependencies
• Ability to communicate well, giving proactive feedback to peers, team, and manager
• Good organizational skills
• Good to Have
• Computer Science or other STEM degree
• Experience with Objective-C
• Experience building MacOS or tvOS applications
• Experience with web-based technologies, such as React and Node, creating APIs, and database management
• Interest in other mobile platforms, such as  Android or Unity
• Previous agency experience

Firstborn fosters a diverse environment that encourages original thinking about our business and empowers us to communicate with a global world of customers. We embrace differences of opinion and diversity of thought as they help us challenge and refine our solutions. Firstborn, as a best-in-class marketing agency, welcomes big ideas, and believes they can come from anywhere.

Perks & Benefits

Firstborn offers a flexible vacation policy, retirement benefits, paid sick leave, generous health, dental and vision insurance options, parental leave, adoption benefits, and more. We recognize high-performers and provide long-term growth opportunities. We hope you'll join us!

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

FLSA Status: Exempt