Software Engineer

About us

Thoughtful makes it easy to spend more time on the content you love—instead of what’s trending on social media today. By transforming wasted downtime in toxic social media apps into time spent going deeper on your interests, learning, and growing, Thoughtful makes you happier and healthier every day.

We’re a small team with decades of experience at companies like Facebook and Apple. Our CEO, Brian Amerige, was one of the 20 engineers who built Facebook’s first native iPhone app, before tech-leading Paper, and then starting+leading the engineering and design teams responsible for the Facebook experience on all platforms. Alex Epstein, co-founder, has started multiple profitable content businesses and leads our strategy to ensure the technology we build is deeply optimized to help people flourish.

How Thoughtful works

1. Thoughtful brings together all the sources of interesting and good-for-you content you know about—podcasts, YouTube channels, Substacks, articles, Kindle books, and Audible audiobooks—into a single place. You consume all of this content directly in Thoughtful, where your place is automatically saved. This content exists in endless quantity on the Internet, but it’s usually drowned out by low-value junk, and spread out in many places, which makes it difficult to find and focus on.

2. When you open Thoughtful, we make it easy to focus on the content that you value most in the moment, whether you want to read, watch, or listen, and whether you want to focus on (in our CEO’s case) tech, philosophy, or snowboarding. The secret sauce is that no matter the context, in Thoughtful there’s always something that’s both interesting and good for you.

Learn more about Thoughtful here.

Who we're looking

We’re looking for someone up for the challenge and opportunity of working across our native iOS and Mac apps (Objective-C, Swift, UIKit), backend services (TypeScript, NodeJS), and web app (Express). Working closely with Brian, Alex, and our designer, you’ll be directly involved in every step of product development—from ideation, planning, and architecture to implementation, testing, launch, and maintenance.

Our mission is ambitious—building a future where digital downtime is dominated not by reactivity and toxicity, but learning, growth, and going deeper on your interests—so we’re looking for candidates that are intensely passionate about this work and dedicated to bringing it to life.

This role has significant potential for growth and future leadership opportunities.

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience developing high-quality software with at least two or more of: Objective-C, Swift, Typescript, NodeJS

• Strong understanding of object-oriented design, asynchronous networking, and large-scale databases (like NoSQL)

• Excellent communication skills

• Driven, capable of prioritizing, organizing, and directing your own work

• Interested in frequent in-person collaboration. Candidates will either work at our office full-time, or commit to a hybrid model where they spend ~3 days at our office working in person with us every 6-8 weeks (all expenses paid).

Pay & benefits

• Base salary between $90,000 and $125,000 depending on skills, experience, and location

• Equity between 0.25% and 2%. Our most recent valuation (seed) was $18M as of June 2024.

• Competitive, high-quality medical, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k)

• Beautiful, modern office with ergonomic workspaces overlooking the Rocky Mountains in Lehi, Utah

• We’re a calm startup: we focus intensely and have ambitious goals, but we also take advantage of the amazing environment we work in, with occasional morning snowboarding/skiing/hiking when we can. We play the long-game and know that healthy, happy people do the best work.

Learn more about who we are and the company we're building