Photograph of Jeff Verkoeyen in Sedona

Jeff Verkoeyen, 2024

Latest status

Building a stealth startup

Leader. Designer. Polyglot engineer.

Google iOS design leadership

For over a decade, Jeff was a key leader of Google’s iOS design and developer community. Jeff led UX engineering for the initial launch of Google Maps for iOS, co-founded the team responsible for the company’s iOS design and engineering guidance, and was a vocal champion for building great Google products on Apple platforms.

Jeff has one mission, which is to improve the design and user experience of Google products on Apple platforms. This is evident in every facet of his work and is having company wide impact across many PAs, orgs and teams.
- Leadership feedback, 2023

Jeff’s relentless pursuit of quality-first software design empowered Google’s iOS community to tune product UX to people’s needs and expectations on iOS.

If you’ve used a Google product on Apple platforms, you’ve used code built or influenced by Jeff’s team.

Jeff quit Google in 2024. Stay tuned :)

Facebook iOS, Three20, Nimbus, Google Maps for iOS

Prior to Google, Jeff was engineer #3 on Facebook’s iOS engineering team. Jeff took ownership of the most popular open source iOS project at the time, Three20. From 2010 to 2011, Jeff built v1 of the Facebook iPad app with Brandon Walkin and had it demoed to Steve Jobs. Jeff left Facebook in 2011 to turn Three20 into Nimbus, an open source framework whose growth was bounded by the quality of its documentation.

A red panda, the logo for the Nimbus open source framework

“Not only is Nimbus incredibly useful, but it serves as an exemplar of responsible development (a “framework whose feature set grows only as fast as its documentation” is an attitude I wish a lot more projects would adopt). Three cheers to Jeff Verkoeyen and all of the contributors for their hard work on this.”
— Mattt Thompson (of NSHipster and AFNetworking)

In 2012 Jeff found himself in a room with Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz. Google+ had just spun up, and Jeff became one of the few engineers that left Facebook to join Google at the time (most were doing the opposite). After one month on the Google+ iPad project, and another few months on the Google+ Games SDK, Apple announced that they were going to stop using Google Maps for their native Maps app.

The original Google Maps for iOS app icon from 2012

Within a week, Jeff found and joined the team that would end up launching six months later one of the industry’s most well received, stable, and polished v1 apps to date: Google Maps for iOS. He was lucky to join what became Google’s internal “iOS mafia”, a crew of whom many were still at Google more than a decade later, and many continued to lead critical iOS efforts across the company.

Jeff not only designed and implemented a large chunk of the Maps UI, but he was also a key player in doing code reviews for the other members of the team. Basically any change to the UI has Jeff’s name on it as either the implementor or the reviewer.
— Leadership feedback, 2012

As one of the team’s most experienced UX/UI engineers, Jeff worked closely with design and engineering to build a set of modular UI components that would go on to form the foundation of the company’s iOS apps, eventually becoming a core part of what is now publicly known as Material design.

Photograph of Jeff with his wife and daughter

Family, 2023

Family and travel

Jeff lives in Montecito with Nina, Eva, and Buddha (the cat).

Prior to Montecito, Jeff traveled all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, Europe to Southeast Asia. Of everywhere he’s been, Montecito is his favorite.