Manuel Alvarez

Open to remote roles

Manuel AlvarezSenior iOS Engineer

I build iOS apps that ship and keep working. 9+ years in Swift, from a ridesharing startup in Miami to payments at scale at PayPal, where I work on Venmo.

SwiftUI · Swift 6 strict concurrency · Swift Testing · on-device AI

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Skip the intro
  1. Spec first. Every feature starts as a written spec.
  2. Agents write, I review. Claude Code and Codex draft the code. I read every diff.
  3. Tested before it ships. Swift Testing on every change.
  4. On device. Built and checked on real iPhone and Apple Watch hardware.
  5. In your users' hands. Shipped to the App Store and kept working.
years building iOS apps
9+
Career
PRs with tests in a 3-month window at Venmo
58 / 68
PayPal
test coverage on a PedidosYa module
56% → 80.6%
PedidosYa
smaller app after an MVVM rebuild at Lipo
50%
Lipo

Experience

Where I've shipped

  1. PayPal

    Current

    Senior iOS Engineer (Venmo)

    Mar 2024 – presentRemote

    • Swift Testing
    • GraphQL
    • Apollo
    • Led the end-to-end evolution of the account linking experience: first-time user flow, state persistence, per-experiment analytics and in-app feedback, covered by 106 Swift Testing files.
    • Built converged payment routing for checkout, with richer approval responses and funding selection preserved through shipping callbacks.
    • Made tests part of every change: in a 3-month window, 58 of my 68 PRs touched test suites, across 65 unique Swift test files.
    • Hardened GraphQL (Apollo) contracts, payment methods, remote messaging and data mappings.
    • Raised a module's test coverage to 86%.

  2. SmartJob

    iOS Developer

    Feb 2022 – Mar 2024

    • VIPER
    • CocoaPods
    • Shipped features for Falabella's retail apps in Colombia, Peru and Chile.
    • Added example apps to the business pods so features could be built and tested without the full base project.
    • Created a VIPER module template.

  3. Kubikware (client: Utility)

    Senior Mobile Engineer

    Sep 2021 – Feb 2022

    • Instruments
    • iOS work on ROMWOD, a mobility and recovery workout app, for Utility, a US mobile agency.
    • Tracked down memory leaks with Instruments and fixed data races, years before Swift 6 strict concurrency could catch them at compile time.

  4. PedidosYa

    iOS Engineer

    Jun 2021 – Sep 2021

    • Modularization
    • CocoaPods
    • A/B testing
    • Split code out of the monolith into modules with pods and gems.
    • Raised a module's test coverage from 56% to 80.6%.
    • Cut feature-flag usage for A/B testing by 26%.

  5. Lipo (Miami)

    iOS Engineer

    Feb 2020 – Jun 2021

    • MVVM
    • Ridesharing startup growing users 20% at the time.
    • Refactored legacy code into a crash-free app.
    • Halved the app size by migrating to MVVM.
    • Cut development time by 40% with an MVVM template that reduced merge conflicts.
  6. Earlier2018 – 2021

    Quarks Alchemist, Appstract, GIE Group: MVPs, an iBeacon equipment tracker on Azure, and cross-platform work.

Side projects

What I build on my own time

  • In development

    Glyco

    A companion app for people with type 1 diabetes, for iPhone and Apple Watch.

    SwiftUI app with widgets, a Live Activity, Siri and App Intents. Apple's Foundation Models runs on device, or on Private Cloud Compute, to summarize the user's own data and draft meals from text, voice or a photo. A NestJS backend handles accounts, subscriptions and content, and never stores health data.

    ui
    SwiftUI · WidgetKit · App Intents
    ai
    Foundation Models · Private Cloud Compute
    data
    HealthKit + SwiftData, on device
    backend
    NestJS · no health data

    Not public yet.

    • iPhone
    • Apple Watch
  • Not on the App Store

    AquaNav

    Dive computer for Apple Watch Ultra, with an iOS companion app and a sync backend.

    Depth access requires an Apple entitlement that was not granted.

    • Apple Watch Ultra
    • iPhone
  • In development

    KettleHIIT

    HIIT training app (kettlebell, bands, bodyweight) with an AI-generated weekly plan.

    • iPhone
  • Used in my Apple projects

    Swift Agentic Engineering Kit

    My own Claude Code plugin for Apple projects: agents, skills and safety hooks, built during Apple Coding Academy's Swift Agentic Engineering Program.

    • Claude Code plugin

How I work

Specs, tests, and every diff reviewed

  1. Swift 6 strict concurrency and SwiftUI by default; UIKit and Objective-C when the codebase needs it.

  2. Tests come with the change, not after: Swift Testing for new code.

  3. Agentic coding (Claude Code, Codex, Xcode) driven by written specs, with me reviewing every diff.

  4. Before code, I was a public accountant. I still check whether a feature paid off.

Now learning

AI engineering

In progress

Studying AI engineering: model APIs, agent workflows, and RAG over my own notes with local models on Apple Silicon.

  • model APIs
  • agent workflows
  • RAG
  • local models

Contact

Hiring for iOS? Let's talk.

Open to remote roles