About this role
**About Blue:** Blue is building a new kind of phone, with your chief of staff built in. Blue sees what you do and reads every notification, text, and email for you. Based on everything it’s learned about you, it decides what to do with each one: handle it and leave you an FYI, or draft a reply and wait for your OK. And anything else in your life is one button away from being off your plate.
It works from day one. When you switch, Blue reads everything that comes over from your iPhone, so it already knows the people in your life, how you write, and the passwords, cards, and IDs it needs, kept in a secure vault you both share. No onboarding, and no explaining yourself.
Delegation this deep isn’t possible from an app. It takes owning the operating system and, ultimately, the hardware. Today the Blue OS runs on Google Pixel hardware while our own hardware is in development. We’re Y Combinator-backed, seed-funded, and our first customers already use it as their daily phone.
**The role**
You will own Blue OS below the app layer: the system image, framework and SystemUI changes, privileged services, and the release pipeline that gets each build onto customers' phones. When a build goes out, you decide whether it is ready and how it rolls out. This role is as much about safety, review and releases, as new features. Expect to say no.
**What you'll own**
* **The OS image.** Framework overlays, SystemUI and keyguard changes, default permissions and role grants, SELinux policy, and our privileged system app.
* **Releases and OTA.** Staged rollouts, update signing, recovery from a failed update, and staying current with new Android releases.
* **Platform quality.** Device tests on real hardware for every image, crash and ANR reports from the field, and review of every change that touches the OS.
**What we're looking for**
* You have shipped AOSP-level changes to production devices: images, framework or SystemUI, overlays, SELinux policy
* You have shipped OTA updates to real users and dealt with one that went wrong
* You know the platform's sharp edges: the permission and role model, multi-user, hidden and virtual displays, boot and first-run, the accessibility and notification services
* You review code the way you want yours reviewed. You block a change when it needs it, and you explain why
* You work well with ambiguity and can move quickly without sacrificing quality
* You want to make a Blue Phone your daily phone
**Nice to have**
* Experience working with Android forks, If you worked on a security-focused fork, that's a huge plus
* Experience reviewing AI-generated code, or working with coding agents
* General backend experience serving and scaling services in production
**Why join now**
* You will be the most senior engineer in your domain on a small team
* You will set how the Blue OS ships, in its first year with customers
* Even though we use AI tools for most of our development, we have gone through a lot of effort to ensure that our OS work is not AI generated slop, and you get to carry that torch
\
We're also planning on hiring for other engineering positions very soon across ML, security, infra and backend at varying levels of seniority. If you are interested in Blue but you don't match the job descriptions we have listed, please get in touch with a brief about what you do and what you would like to work on at Blue. You will be considered for the other positions immediately as they open.