Sam Soffes
Staff IOS Engineer at Apple
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarSam Soffes is a staff iOS engineer with 17 years of experience building polished mobile and macOS apps, currently working on Apple Podcasts after a long career of shipping consumer products and platform tooling. He’s built and led teams at startups and large companies—co‑founding a social video startup, serving as CTO, and scaling iOS orgs at GitHub and Lyft—while also founding Nothing Magical to incubate side projects that led to acquisitions. A prolific open‑source contributor, Sam maintains well‑used libraries like SAMKeychain, GradientView and tooling improvements at Venmo and Cocoa projects, demonstrating deep expertise in Swift, Objective‑C and cross‑platform UI. He pairs hands‑on engineering (from core APIs to UI components) with product instincts—rewriting image pipelines at Hipstamatic and driving design systems at Lyft—to improve reliability, accessibility and developer experience. Off the clock he’s currently converting those skills into vanlife: building a camper van and traveling, which explains why he’s not seeking new roles right now.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
English
Stackoverflow
14,881reputation
1.9mreached
90answers
8questions
compression
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
cocoa-touch
top-5%
cocoa
top-5%
iphone
top-1%
macos
top-5%
Github Skills (47)
objective-c10
uiimageview10
ios10
mobile-development10
keyboard-shortcuts10
shortcuts10
ui-design10
carbon-copy10
appkit10
arcus10
mobile-application10
uid10
carbon-lang10
uitableview10
keychain10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
soffes/sstoolkit
Sep 2009 - Jun 2015
A collection of well-documented iOS classes for making life easier
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:760 commits, 1 push in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Sam's contributions focused on adding and modifying UI elements and their associated behavior within the iOS application. The commits included implementing new features like image animations, a star selector, and an address bar, along with improvements to existing components, such as the web view and text field. The user primarily worked on visual components and their integration with the app's user interface.
ios
soffes/GradientView
Jun 2013 - Jun 2020
Easily use gradients in UIKit for iOS & tvOS
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:16 releases, 69 commits, 19 PRs in 7 years
Contributions summary:Sam's contributions focused on enhancing the `SAMGradientView` library for iOS, introducing features like customizable borders and radial gradient support. They implemented code to add and refine gradient drawing functionality. Further, the user addressed issues and improved the example app for better user experience.
iostvosswiftcarthagecocoapods
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