Lead App Developer

We're looking for an App Lead to own the engineering path for our consumer app. You'll work closely with the CTO and product while continuing to code. You'll own architecture, technical standards, code quality, and release readiness and help a team of engineers become strong, independent feature owners. This is a hands-on leadership role, not a people-management position.

Responsibilities:

• Drive features from agreed scope through stable production release.
• Own mobile architecture, technical decisions, and engineering standards.
• Identify dependencies, risks, and trade-offs early with product, backend, and firmware.
• Define acceptance criteria, integration testing, and rollout plans.
• Own reliability across BLE connectivity, background execution, audio flows, offline recovery, and platform-specific behavior.
• Review code for correctness, concurrency/async behavior, security, performance, recovery, and test coverage.
• Establish risk-based review and release gates.
• Investigate difficult production issues and drive them to resolution.
• Coach engineers through real implementation and design decisions.
• Build a culture where feature owners take responsibility for implementation, testing, and release evidence.
• Continue contributing hands-on code to the product.

Requirements:

• 4-7 years of mobile/app engineering experience.
• Previous experience as an app lead, mobile lead, tech lead, or equivalent, with genuine technical leadership responsibility.
• Experience leading engineers through multiple production releases of a consumer-facing mobile product.
• Strong Android or iOS fundamentals and the ability to debug beyond the framework layer.
• Strong understanding of mobile architecture, asynchronous programming, performance, testing, and production reliability.
• Recent hands-on coding experience.
• Experience conducting thorough code/design reviews and raising engineering standards.
• Proven ability to coach engineers and build independent technical ownership.
• Comfortable balancing product speed with engineering quality.
• Able to make technical decisions independently rather than routing every decision through the CTO.

Good to Have:

• Skills: Flutter / Dart, BLE / Bluetooth / connected devices, wearables / IoT products, real-time audio or voice applications, offline-first systems, and recovery.
• Background execution and battery optimization.
• Consumer products operating at scale.
• Experience in an early-stage/product startup.
• Thoughtful use of AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or GitHub Copilot.

Skills

android, app, ble, bluetooth, dart, flutter, ios, iot, mobile