Dir. Mobile Engineering

About Halo

At Halo, we're building technology that strengthens the bond between people and their pets. Our connected ecosystem of smart collars, mobile apps, and digital services helps pet owners create safe environments, build positive habits, and share more adventures with their dogs. 

Our Priorities: customers first, ownership & accountability, focus & intention, and collaboration led growth.

The Opportunity

Mobile is Halo's largest engineering team, full of strong individual talent, but without a leader who owns direction and decision-making. Today those decisions bottleneck through our CTO. This is a net-new, first-of-its-kind leadership role: you'll own mobile architecture end to end, lead the team's shift to AI-native development, and build the next layer of engineering leadership, all while we transition from a monolithic team into fast-moving, parallel pods running Shape Up.

What You'll Do

• Chair the Mobile Guild and set architectural direction across iOS and Android, reconciling firmware, backend, and mobile constraints before feature work begins.
• Define and drive our AI-native development practice — the standards, tooling, guardrails, and evaluation frameworks for agent-assisted, AI-driven engineering across the team, put into production and measured against real cycle-time and defect-rate gains.
• Own Release Readiness Reviews and sign off on what ships from mobile.
• Lead, coach, and career-path platform leads and developers across pods; own the mobile hiring bar.
• Represent mobile engineering at the Betting Table and in executive forums, translating engineering investment into business terms.
• Partner with the VP of Product on roadmap sequencing and design quality, and sync weekly with the CTO on architecture and investment priorities.

What You'll Bring to the Table

• AI-native engineering in practice, not experimentation: you've implemented AI-driven development yourself and led at least a few engineers onto that way of working — even if not yet at this scale. We're open to someone who's done this one level down and is ready to grow into leading it here. .
• Hands-on iOS and Android depth (SwiftUI, TCA, Kotlin): enough to review pull requests and earn technical respect from senior engineers.
• Proven leadership of a small-to-mid mobile team (~10–15 engineers): still close to execution rather than several layers removed.
• Systems thinking across mobile, backend, and firmware: able to formalize on-device vs. service vs. firmware trade-offs, and comfortable where connectivity and data are unreliable.
• Proven success shipping design-forward consumer apps at scale (millions of users, high App Store ratings), and a track record of pushing engineers toward greater design quality.
• A track record of recruiting, mentoring, and retaining high-caliber engineers through periods of rapid change.
• Comfort leading a distributed, Europe-based team, including an early Eastern-time start for daily overlap.
• A history of driving change: building conviction in a team and holding the line under delivery pressure.
• If you haven't personally reviewed a pull request or been in production code within the last year, this isn't the right seat — we need someone still close to the work, not a manager of managers.

Nice to Have

• Background in consumer health/wearables, connected devices/IoT, mobility, automotive, or premium consumer product companies.
• Experience working with a contractor or engineering-partner staffing model.
• AI/ML built into the product itself, not just the development workflow.

Perks of the Pack

• Medical, dental, and vision plans, plus company-paid Long-Term Disability.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Paid time off.
• Free Halo gear and product testing opportunities.
• Work remotely from anywhere in the U.S.
• Be part of a mission-driven, dog-loving team.

We provide competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base salary, incentives, and benefits. The base salary for this role is $200,000 - 220,000. Final compensation depends on experience, skills, and qualifications.