About Us and Why We’re Hiring
We’re YNAB (“why-nab”), a product company with a mission: to help people get good at money so they never worry about money again. For over 20 years, YNAB has been changing lives—and people can’t stop telling their friends about it. Think: debt paid off, marriages strengthened, goals achieved, stress erased, and sleep finally restored. But don’t just take our word for it—dive into our vibrant communities on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit (really!) or skim through our glowing app reviews. You’ll quickly see why people rave about YNAB and why we’re so passionate about creating something that truly changes lives for the better.
Join us! YNAB’s software ecosystem includes apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android phones, and web. We have some big plans for our iOS app, and that’s where you come in! You’ll help us build easy and joyful consumer‑facing experiences across the entire Apple ecosystem, while working with modern Swift tools, thoughtfully shared logic, a nice CI/CD pipeline, and plenty of room to ship impactful things. If this resonates with you, you’re our target audience—please read on.
What We’re Looking For
Hard Requirements
For this role, you must:
- Live in the United States, in Mountain, Central, or Eastern Time. (Or able to work Mountain hours if you’re in Pacific Time.)
- Be authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship or employer participation in an immigration-related work authorization process, now or in the future.
- Have at least five years of professional software development experience.
- Have at least three years of experience writing native iOS apps.
- Have experience with Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, Xcode & Instruments, and XCTest / XCUITest.
- Be confident and curious about using AI to do your job better, while knowing what is not worth outsourcing.
Preferred Qualifications
These aren’t required, but are likely to set you up for success:
- Experience with SQL, Kotlin, and/or JavaScript / TypeScript.
- Experience with OCR technologies or frameworks.
- Experience working on cross-functional teams with fullstack and/or Android engineers, product managers, and designers.
Note: If you believe you’re a fit for this role, but don’t meet our preferred qualifications, we still encourage you to apply. While our hard requirements are non-negotiable, we’re otherwise open-minded, and don’t need you to be the “perfect” candidate on paper.
That’s a quick snapshot of what we’re looking for. Before we go further, let’s make sure you’re excited about working with us. We’ll share more about YNAB, then dive into the role details and application process (be sure to read all the way to the end!).
Life at YNAB
YNAB started in 2004 and we haven’t taken any outside funding—we’re established, profitable, and in this for the long haul. We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our original Core Value Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading it, you’ll probably really like it here!
We live our Core Values every day at YNAB, and we mean it when we say we are an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, beliefs, and experiences is critical to our success, and we are passionate about creating a welcoming, supportive, and collaborative environment for all employees. All are encouraged to apply as we continue to grow a smart, hard-working, and diverse team that loves working together to build something that matters.
We also work really hard, together, to make working at YNAB an amazing experience, and we’re (humbly) proud to have received many of Fortune’s “great place to work” awards over the last several years, including #1 two years in a row! We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with.
Who You’ll Work With
Our Engineering team is about 45 people strong, including a tight-knit group of eight iOS developers. We operate in cross-functional teams, so you’ll get to work with awesome people from all different roles in the company.
Regardless of their varied interests, all of our developers have one thing in common: They are a joy to work with. You won’t find heated arguments and raised voices here. We save our competitive spirit for YNAB’s external competitors (or the occasional online game session), but internally we build up our teammates and celebrate their successes. We all love to program and solve problems in creative ways, and we regularly take time to geek out and show each other something cool we built or found to make our lives easier.
And of course, as a developer, you’ll work closely with PM and Design. Our Product Managers are all about clarity and collaboration. They’re great at setting the stage, understanding needs, mapping out priorities, and inviting and valuing engineering input. And our designers are truly amazing, with the awards (including at least one actual Emmy®) to prove they’re good at designing stuff. YNAB designers welcome feedback and suggestions during the development process and are happy to tweak an interaction if you tell them it will save you significant development effort. With both PM and Design at YNAB, it’s refreshingly not “just build this”; it’s “let’s figure out the best way together.”
How You’ll Work at YNAB
Now that you’ve learned about some of your future teammates, let’s talk more about what it’s like to work here.
Building a Good Company
At YNAB, we think one of the best things we can offer is the chance to do meaningful work alongside people you respect, admire, and genuinely enjoy. And we mean that—from the beginning, we’ve been intentional about creating the company we want to work for.
Along the way, we’ve learned that great teams aren’t built on perks or fancy titles—they’re built by bringing together high performers who thrive on tough challenges and share a commitment to doing exceptional work. We value discipline and ownership over unnecessary layers of process, and look for people who wake up excited to get important things done.
That’s the team we’re building at YNAB: one that cares deeply, works pragmatically, and always finds time to laugh (mostly at ourselves).
Responsibility and Empowerment
We trust our team. We respect each person’s expertise and judgment—and we empower you to make the calls you think are right. We know mistakes happen—and that’s okay. Taking smart risks and exploring new ideas is how we grow. When things don’t go as planned, we learn fast, adjust, and keep moving forward.
We’re big on collaboration, too. We aim for just enough structure to keep things moving smoothly, and when decisions need to be made, we make sure there’s a clear owner. But: You're never on your own here. Whether you need feedback, a gut check, or someone to jump in and help out, we’ve got your back. We take ownership of our work and our outcomes—together.
Live (Almost) Anywhere in the U.S.
We’ve always been a fully remote team, and have people all over the world. For this particular position, however, we have two restrictions that we can’t make exceptions on. We can only consider candidates who 1) live in the United States, in Mountain, Central, or Eastern Time (or able to work Mountain hours if you’re in Pacific Time) and 2) are authorized to work in the U.S. without employer sponsorship or employer participation in an immigration-related work authorization process (now or in the future). Whew. Now that we got all that legalese out of the way, let’s keep talking about the fun stuff!
Work Four Days a Week
We’ve adopted a four-day work week and rarely work more than that. There are occasions and seasons where things get busy and people put some extra time in—but then we encourage them to take some extra time off, too. We’re a product-led organization that takes our work-life balance seriously, so we all prioritize working hard and smart, but at a measured pace. We care deeply about what we do, but we also love our families and about 2,000 other things. We have perspective and, ultimately, we think it makes us—and our work—even better.
Flex Your Work Schedule
As a remote team, a lot of our work is done asynchronously—but we also love working together in real time. We try to schedule most meetings from 11am-2pm Eastern, Monday-Thursday. Outside of your meetings, we trust you to set your schedule by balancing your team’s needs with your own needs. You don’t need to ask for permission to take off early for an afternoon appointment, or be “active” on Slack if you’re working deeply on a project. We look at what you accomplish, not how long you're in front of a computer.
Take Vacation (Seriously)
We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for our company-wide December Break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office-wall Slack channel!
Meet the Team IRL
We love remote work around here, but we also love getting together in person. You’ll generally have the opportunity to meet with your YNAB teammates at least once a year, at a small-team work-focused meetup or at our biennial company retreat. At the YNAB retreat, we love to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. To give you an idea, we’ve been to Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a ranch in Montana, Palm Springs, Cape Cod, and most recently, Hilton Head. We work together, play together, and strengthen the bonds we’ve made as a team and company. At the end of each retreat, we feel energized, inspired, and excited to tackle the work ahead.
Up Your Game
We’re serious about helping you improve your craft, and will provide you with a professional development stipend each year. Think conferences, online courses, coaching, and dedicated time away from work to learn something new. We love to see our people grow!
Other Benefits
Our team is spread all over the world—mostly in the United States, but also in the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and several other countries. Everyone is eligible for our generous paid family leave, vacation, holidays, and sick time.
Since you’re based in the United States, you’ll also be eligible for our health, dental, and vision insurance, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. No need to check your vision, you read that right—100%. (Although if you did need to check your vision, NBD, we’ve got you covered!)
We also have a Traditional and Roth 401(k) option, where YNAB matches your contributions up to six percent with immediate vesting. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. Not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.)
Competitive Compensation
At YNAB, we are dedicated to providing equitable, market-driven, and data-informed compensation, along with a competitive benefits package. The starting salary for this role will range from $145,000 - $190,000 USD annually. (This covers a wide range of possible experiences; think of it like a bell curve. Most candidates fall somewhere around the midpoint.) You’ll also be eligible for an annual raise and profit-sharing twice a year. When YNAB succeeds, so do you—that’s the idea.
A Few Final Tidbits
- Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. We love to celebrate with you when you complete things on your bucket list!
- We’ll also ask you (and your manager, and your friends, and maybe even your mom) what some of your favorite things are—we’ve got a “birthdays and other gifts” category in our spending plan, and we’re adding you to it.
- We want you firing on all cylinders so we’ll set you up with a top-of-the-line computer and phone and will replace them regularly.
- Did we mention that YNAB makes a huge, positive difference in people’s lives? You may not think that matters much, but then a few months down the road, you’ll realize it’s made your job really, really enjoyable. Don’t underestimate this!
If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you, and how you’ll play a big part in changing people’s lives.
Now Back to You, Our New iOS Engineer....
As our new iOS engineer, you’ll need to be a pragmatic problem solver who takes ownership of your work and thrives in a collaborative environment.
It takes the entire Engineering team to keep YNAB “the software” up and humming. Our engineers work together, which helps ensure we have sound designs and that our code and systems are efficient, maintainable, and as bug-free as possible. You’ll work with other engineers and QA, collaborate on technical strategies and methodologies, and review each other’s work. You’ll also regularly engage with other departments: with a customer support representative on reproduction steps for a bug, with a designer to iterate on a feature, or with a PM on the technical feasibility of product ideas.
At YNAB, solving engineering problems means communicating early, often, and thoughtfully across the company. You’ll need to meet our high standards for clear, empathetic communication, and address issues directly with a respectful and constructive approach. There’s not a lot of ego around here, even though we are very proud of the outcomes we achieve together, and this is reflected in our communication style.
Your Day-to-Day
- You’ll be embedded in a product team whose focus is making transaction entry seamless for YNAB users. You’ll work alongside a PM, product designer, QA analyst, support specialist, and a few other fullstack engineers (you’ll be the sole mobile engineer on this team, at least for now). Your work on the product team will include:
- Brainstorming with product team members on new features and changes to existing functionality.
- Reviewing UI/UX designs and offer product-related design suggestions and platform-specific feedback.
- Working with PMs and designers to provide technical feasibility and effort guidance and break down designs into tightly scoped development plans.
- Working with Support to investigate and solve tricky customer issues.
- Collaborating with QA to ensure our combined testing methods give us confidence in our quality.
- And, of course: Architecting, designing, developing, testing, deploying, monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining code for product initiatives, platform roadmaps, and infrastructure projects.
- You’ll periodically serve as the Mobile Release Owner, which includes:
- Shepherding the next version of the iOS app through the mobile release process.
- Being the single point of contact for the release.
- Driving solutions and enlisting help from others for any issues or regressions found during the release flow.
- You’ll also help monitor and maintain all aspects of our iOS platform. For example:
- Proactively fixing production-related issues.
- Keeping an eye on system logs and crash reports.
- Staying current on iOS trends and upcoming versions.
- Applying security patches and updating third-party libraries.
Our Engineering Team
- Our Engineering department features a unique peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical leadership style with separate roles for technical stewardship and people management.
- You may also eventually have the opportunity to contribute to the Engineering team in an additional capacity. For example, you could in time serve as a:
- DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). A DRI is the point person for one area of our technology. A DRI may not be the technical expert in all aspects of their area, but they keep us pointed in the right direction. And, while we enjoy consensus, DRIs can make a call if necessary to keep us moving forward.
- People manager. Engineering managers at YNAB don’t dictate priorities or assign resources. Instead, they serve as the connection between their reports and the company. Engineering managers often do not work on the same project or even in the same platform stack as the people they manage, so this role is less about giving technical feedback (we rely on peers for that) and more about having an affinity for the people side of things, being great at helping others flourish.
- Both the DRI and Engineering Manager roles are part-time, only requiring a portion of each workweek. This allows DRIs and managers to remain individual contributors first and foremost—a key part of our structure and culture.
- These additional roles are not promotions but simply different ways of contributing.
Our iOS Tech Stack
In case this helps you determine your interest and fit, here’s a glimpse of some of the tech you’ll encounter:
- You’d be stepping into a mature codebase with native UI and app infrastructure combined with cross-platform shared business logic in a client-server setting.
- The native side is a modern Swift codebase. Extensive use of Swift Concurrency. UIKit appears in older flows, but newer work is SwiftUI. A tiny Objective‑C layer remains for long‑lived utilities.
- The app is highly modular, split into many internal Swift Package Manager modules, and grouped into Core, Application, and Presentation packages—so you don’t have to recompile the world when you change one feature.
- Feature flags, “Labs” builds, and a dedicated “Debug” module makes it easy to experiment and roll changes out gradually.
- We share cross-platform business logic through a packaged JavaScript library and Kotlin Multiplatform. It’s a big plus if you have a little experience with TypeScript or Kotlin.
- The app is local-first: data is stored in SQLite through FMDB with a custom query layer and background‑sync engine.
- Swift Package Manager manages dependencies and internal modules. Fastlane drives build configurations with Match handling certificates and provisioning profiles. Bitrise runs these pipelines. Around that sit a Makefile, Bash and Ruby helper scripts, SwiftLint, and some other niceties that run automatically.
- There are multiple app surfaces: native App Intents, WidgetKit widgets, plus a basic watchOS companion.
- While we have a QA team to help, quality is developer-driven. We have dedicated Unit and UI test targets, and run them automatically in CI. A home‑grown page‑object framework and many helper extensions keep UI tests readable and (comparatively) easy to develop.
That’s a lot of bullet points, but let’s still say that your success as an iOS engineer at YNAB will depend on you being a systems thinker who loves to collaborate with others to solve problems. In doing so, you’ll need to consider a solution’s entire architecture and lifespan, and think deeply about the implications of various technical choices, including scalability, security, pragmatism, and future maintenance. You’ll measure your success not just by code shipped or isolated tasks completed, but by problems effectively solved and value added to the overall project. It’s this combination of ownership and teamwork that ensures that our applications and the different parts of our software work well together, ultimately improving the overall quality of our tech.
If this sounds like your kind of place, we can’t wait to hear from you.
How to Apply
Submit your application (including what’s listed below) by Sunday, June 7th at 11:59pm PT. Firm. It’s a real deadline.
What to Include in Your Application
- A resume. If you don’t have an updated formal resume, that’s fine! An informal overview of your work history and education is all we’re looking for.
- A cover letter and answers to a few specific questions. But not your typical cover letter. You have our permission to NOT be formal, just help us get to know you.
- On page 1: We’d love for you to tell us a bit about yourself, what drew you to iOS development, why you’re interested in this role at YNAB, and why you think you’d be a great fit.
- On page 2 onward: Please answer these three questions:
- 1. How have you honed your craft as a developer, and how do you see yourself continuing to develop your skills in the future? We’d love to hear specific strategies, sources of information or inspiration, and/or your general approach. Please answer in no more than 2 paragraphs.
- 2. Tell us about a time you pushed for something at work, but a different direction was chosen. What did you do? How did it turn out? Please answer in no more than 3 paragraphs.
- 3. Imagine you’re our new iOS Engineer and you’re reviewing a pull request from a teammate who has spent the past two weeks building a major feature. They’re clearly proud of it and excited to ship. But you can see the approach has a fundamental architectural problem—it’s going to cause performance issues and be difficult to maintain. Addressing it properly would mean rethinking a significant portion of the work. Please draft a 1-2 paragraph comment as if you’re addressing your teammate directly.
Tips
- If you meet our hard requirements and follow the application instructions, we promise a real human will review your materials. With that being said: Please be yourself! We want to get to know you, not AI.
- Keep an eye out for an email from @pinpoint.email titled Thank you for applying to YNAB! This confirms your application has been received. If you don’t see that email, we probably didn’t get your application—please try again.
- Click here for an outline of what this hiring process will look like. It’s rigorous, but truthfully, people say it’s fun!
We’re excited to hear from you!
P.S. If you’re not interested in this position right now, but know someone who might be, we’d appreciate you passing this along!
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