App Lead

As an App Lead, you will lead engineering for NeoSapien's consumer mobile application, working closely with the CTO and product team. You will own the app architecture, engineering standards, code quality, and technical release readiness while continuing to contribute hands-on. You will also mentor engineers, establish clear ownership, and build a team that can make strong technical decisions independently. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure people-management position.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

End-to-End Engineering Ownership:

• Own the engineering journey from agreed product scope to stable production release.
• Identify technical dependencies, risks, and trade-offs early.
• Work closely with product, backend, and firmware teams to align on acceptance criteria, integration testing, and rollout plans.
• Ensure features are technically ready before committing to release timelines.

Mobile Reliability and Performance:

• Own reliability across critical consumer-app experiences, including Bluetooth/BLE connectivity and reconnection, background execution, offline functionality and recovery, audio capture and playback flows, battery consumption and optimization, platform-specific Android/iOS behavior, crash prevention and production debugging, performance, and responsiveness.

Code Quality and Technical Standards:

• Establish strong engineering and code-review standards.
• Review code for correctness, asynchronous behavior, recovery scenarios, performance, security, and test coverage.
• Define risk-based review gates for critical features.
• Ensure releases have the necessary technical evidence before going to production.
• Be comfortable stopping or delaying a release when critical engineering risks have not been addressed.

Technical Leadership and Mentoring:

• Give engineers clear ownership of features and technical areas.
• Coach engineers through implementation, testing, and release processes.
• Help engineers develop stronger technical judgment and debugging skills.
• Review high-risk or complex changes while enabling engineers to make decisions independently.
• Build review depth across the team so engineering decisions do not depend solely on the app lead or CTO.

Hands-on Engineering:

• Continue to contribute meaningfully to the codebase.
• Participate in architecture decisions, debugging, and technical problem-solving.
• Investigate difficult production issues and drive them to resolution.
• Simplify systems and designs where possible without compromising reliability.

Requirements:

• 4-7 years of software/mobile engineering experience.
• Previous experience as an app lead, mobile lead, tech lead, or equivalent technical leadership role.
• Proven experience leading engineers through multiple production releases.
• Hands-on experience building and operating consumer-facing mobile applications.
• Strong mobile engineering fundamentals.
• Recent hands-on coding experience.
• Experience owning or contributing significantly to mobile architecture.
• Strong code-review and engineering-quality practices.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and improving their technical decision-making.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with product, backend, and other engineering teams.

Technical Skills:

• Strong experience with Flutter and Dart is highly preferred.
• Strong understanding of Android or iOS fundamentals with the ability to debug issues beyond the Flutter/framework layer.
• Experience with mobile application architecture, asynchronous programming, networking, state management, and testing.
• Strong understanding of application performance, reliability, and production debugging.

Good to Have:

• Experience building connected-device or wearable applications.
• BLE/Bluetooth experience.
• Experience with real-time audio, audio recording, streaming, or playback.
• Experience with offline-first applications and synchronization.
• Experience working with battery-sensitive mobile applications.
• Exposure to native Android/iOS development alongside Flutter.
• Experience working in an early-stage/startup environment.

Leadership Expectations:

• We are looking for someone who has already led a mobile/app engineering team in practice. You should be able to demonstrate:
• Engineers you have directly or technically led.
• Team size and duration of leadership.
• Ownership of architecture and technical decisions.
• Experience conducting meaningful code/design reviews.
• Coaching and mentoring engineers.
• Repeated ownership of production releases.
• Recent hands-on coding and debugging.
• Examples of improving reliability, release quality, or engineering velocity.