Full Stack Engineer (iOS & Android)

Hello from Cansu, Arda & Gözde.

We're three friends from Istanbul who co-founded 🍳PanPals 🍳, a social cooking community on a mission to make people cook more and enjoy the process. PanPals is our first app but not our last. That's why we're building under Pal Labs, the umbrella we're growing this and our next apps under. We're based in London, Rotterdam and Vienna. Between us we cover startup ops, engineering and design.

PanPals is a UK-based early-stage startup operating in the social and consumer space. This is not a recipe or calorie tracking app, but a place for regular people to increase their cooking motivation by coming together around what feels like one big table. It came out of research in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and is now live on the App Store with 2.5K users, zero marketing spend and very sticky metrics like 40%+ W1 retention.

Pal Labs is where it goes from here. We already have something in development and more ideas lined up. We're looking for a full stack developer to build them with us alongside our CTO.

Note that PanPals is currently raising and no one on the team is getting paid yet. Not the co-founders, not the interns. This is an unpaid role with the potential to become a full-time paid one in 3 months. That depends on us raising, which is not something we can promise. We don't want to waste anyone's time so please take this into account and manage your expectations accordingly. What we can promise is the experience and the portfolio you'll build here.

We've built this from scratch since day zero on top of our full-time jobs and studies. We believe in our mission and our cause. We want someone to share this journey with us in the same way. We ship fast and work disciplined but we're very fun to work with.

Time commitment is around 30 hours a week. We don't track hours or set a schedule, so you work on your own time and we measure you by output but the average workload you should expect will come to ≈30hrs.

• What’s expected

🍳 A CS student or similar academic background looking to build real experience in mobile app development and full stack engineering.

🍳 Works alongside our CTO and ship fast. All product input and briefs come from the co-founders: the product, the guidelines, the app narrative, the UI and the technical requirements.

🍳 Highly autonomous. Minimal supervision and no hand holding, so you'll need to learn fast and run with things.

🍳Practical experience building and running apps on both iOS and Android using Flutter or React Native, understanding platform-specific adaptations and managing shared vs. platform-specific code.

🍳Ability to read and navigate Swift code confidently in order to understand existing logic and replicate it faithfully in a cross-platform codebase

🍳 Familiarity with Firestore as a NoSQL database is a nice-to-have; experience with real-time listeners, collections, and document-based data structuring is a plus.

• What we offer

🍳 Early-stage startup experience in a UK-based startup. Fast paced and hands on, working directly with the co-founders. No layers, no bureaucracy.

🍳 Freelance and remote. Work on your own time. We don't track hours and we won't chase you. We measure output not time. Around 30 hours a week, part time moving to full time. This role runs on a lot of trust.

🍳 Access to our Claude and tools. You'll need your own MacBook.

🍳 The co-founders are mostly online on weekends, so expect briefs to land then.

🍳 If the apps you contribute to meaningfully start making revenue, you'll be included in that. Be mindful that this is a rare and hard case and a first for us too, so you'll need to be willing to figure it out with us. We're a fair startup. When we make money you make money, whether that's from an app you helped build or if we raise as a studio.

🍳 A real shot at a permanent paid role in 3 months.

How to apply 

Send us in your application (contact@panpals.co) whatever best shows your previous work. A GitHub link, a live project, anything you've shipped. If it's easier, put it in a Word doc and tell us what you did. No need to over-prepare, we just want to see what you can build.