Help us illuminate journeys!

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Mark Twain

Like Twain, we believe that travel changes lives, and widens perspectives.

We want to help illuminate journeys.

What is Firefly?

Firef.ly is an iOS mobile app that distills the best of trip planning, travel guides, journalling and social sharing with an e-commerce component that offers personalized, one-of-a-kind mementos. It will all be wrapped within a beautiful intuitive user experience, designed for today’s smartphone-enabled traveller.

We want to help people travel better by giving them the best tools for every part of the travel life cycle. From trip planning --> in-destination guiding --> capturing --> sharing --> reliving moments.

The Firef.ly Team

We’ve worked hard to put together a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural team. These are a creative cats you’ll be working with.

Chad Cribbins | CEO + Founder

Multi-award-winning digital creative with expertise honed both in agencies (SapientNitro, Zefer) and startups (Revolution Health, PocketWatch). Chad has deep expertise in multi-channel experience design and has travelled extensively (69 countries and counting).

John Aby Olival | Financial Director

Has built, raised funds, and sold prior companies. Undergrad distinction cum laude and an MBA from London Business School. Extensive experience working at Citibank and Vodafone.

Shawn Low | Editorial Director + Community Manager

Travel editor who has commissioned and written books and articles for Lonely Planet and other publications. Hosted travel documentaries including one with National Geographic. Experienced in digital marketing, in particular social media and content.

Andy Bennett | CTO

A multi-talented hacker and maker of all things, with an keen eye for design. He has extensive experience in mobile, particularly iOS and has led the creation of 5 iOS apps so far.


Location: London Department: Design

We are looking for a junior designer for our mobile travel product called Firef.ly.

You will be responsible for helping extend the current look and feel of Firef.ly to new features and functions for the experience. You will need to help adapt current designs to respond to testing and customer feedback.
An understanding of typography, layout, color, animation, and art direction will be needed to help the team produce the best experience for our customers as possible.

There will also be the need for design work around marketing comms, the website, and social media, and additional areas as needed. We are a startup so you will get your hands dirty and wear many hats.

A good knowledge of the following tool(s) is required:

  • Sketch - we predominately use Sketch.

Also nice to know how to use:
  • Illustrator
  • Photoshop

Bonus for:
  • Paintcode
  • Illustration skills
  • Photography skills

Communication is a big part of the job, so the junior designer must feel confident enough to contribute to the entire creative process. Keeping a finger on the pulse of current trends is also key for staying ahead of the competition.

Typical activities

The specific details of a junior designer’s role will vary, but common activities include:

  • Solving interesting problems via design.
  • Offering input to creative meetings and sharing ideas.
  • Helping define, utilize, challenge, and adapt the current set of design rules currently in place.
  • Producing on-brand, attractive and effective designs.
  • Communicating with senior team members to receive feedback.
  • Supporting the team throughout the execution of campaigns and other projects.
  • Grunt work: creating style guides, workflows, printouts, cuts sheets, and other ad hoc design assets.
  • Ability to extend an existing iconographic language set.
  • The ability to laugh and have a good time. We work hard but we like to have fun.

Skills required
A junior designer needs a wide range of design and creative capabilities. These include:

  • Being creative!!!
  • Ability to defend the work with logical rational (not “it looks pretty”)
  • Adaptable with leading design software packages (Sketch)
  • Hustling!
  • Some creative industry experience.
  • The ability to meet deadlines in a high pressure environment.
  • A background of working as part of a design team (read: plays nice with others).
  • The ability to see projects through from inception to production.
  • Consistency regardless of project size.
  • Good organisational skills that support the rest of the team.
  • The motivation to maintain and improve design standards.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • The willingness to listen to feedback and use it to improve.

From time-to-time a junior designer may need to work hours that aren’t typical, so a flexible approach is needed to get the best from the job.

So I’m interested. What next?

Aside from sending us your CV and a cover letter, please send us a link to samples of your work.

Apply Now

Location: London - Department: Technology

We are looking for an experienced iOS Swift developer with particular experience in location based services and mapping. We are a startup so you will get your hands dirty and wear many hats. We are a fun team working in an exciting space in London.

Here’s a quick overview of job duties:

  • Refining and improving our location tracking library.
  • Working with mapping libraries (MapKit and MapBox).
  • Creating custom UI components, animations and transitions.
  • Integrating with online services via REST APIs.
  • Start date. ASAP.
Qualifying criteria

We value life experience and street smarts over good grades. We like initiative and we don’t like to micromanage. We want smart people who aren’t afraid to ask questions. We want people who enjoy travel and who have travelled!

Now for the boring stuff.

  • Obviously Swift is a new language so we don’t expect years of experience in it, but we are looking for someone who’s worked in Objective-C for a few years before transitioning to swift (ideally full-time).
  • Experience with location based services and mapping (MapKit and MapBox).
  • We use TDD, git and Carthage so experience of these is essential.
  • The app has a custom UI, so experience with this is needed.
  • Our app has parallels to game design, so experience in that area is a definite plus.
  • Experience creating UI components, animations and transitions is also essential, as is being comfortable with autolayout.
  • Other areas where experience would be beneficial include working with REST APIs, geohashing, AVFoundation, CoreGraphics and OpenGL.
  • MapBox is written in C++, as are some parts of our existing codebase, so an understanding of it would be a bonus too.
  • In the future we will port the app to Android, so experience of developing for that platform would be a plus.
  • Similarly coding in other languages on other platforms (eg server side) could be helpful too.
So I’m interested. What next?

Aside from sending us your CV and a cover letter to [email protected], we’d like you to do the following:

  • Code sample: send us a small code sample demonstrating your coding style - ideally a small library or helper with tests.
  • Tell us where you've travelled to and what your best travel experience was.
  • Once selected, we will organise a chat in-person/Google+/Skype/Facetime to outline details and expectations of job.

Apply Now

Location: London - Department: Technology

Firefly Experience Ltd. is looking for a talented developer proficient with a wide-range of skills to join our all-star team based in London. You will work with on our user’s location data including GPS, activity, and semantic information including places visited and their survey data to build algorithms capable of presenting this information to them in different ways.

The work you develop will become part of the application framework developed on the device using Swift, Objective-C, and C++. The code you develop will also communicate with our servers hosted through Azure, and also help develop our backend capable of performing queries, visualization, and advanced analytics using machine learning techniques. Your role will span multiple disciplines of data scientist, computational scientist, and software engineer and require you to learn a wide range of skills very quickly:

Desired skills:

  • Swift/Objective-C/C/C++
  • Python
  • Node.js
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Structures such as Quad Trees, R-trees, and B-Trees
  • Mapbox, Mapbox Studio and CLI extensions
  • PostGIS extensions
  • ELK Stack
So I’m interested. What next?

If you are interested, please send a CV and cover letter to our CTO: [email protected]

Apply Now