Lead Mobile Developer

Who you are

• You are an experienced mobile engineer who cares deeply about building exceptional consumer products
• You are energized by 0-to-1 product development and the opportunity to turn an idea into a product used by real customers. You bring an entrepreneurial mindset to engineering: you move quickly, take ownership beyond your immediate technical responsibilities, challenge assumptions, and focus relentlessly on building something users love
• This role will have the autonomy and ownership of an early-stage product team, backed by the technology, resources, and reach of an established company. You are excited by the opportunity to help build a new product and team from the ground up and to have an outsized influence on both its technical direction and its success in the market
• You have strong opinions about what makes a mobile application feel fast, intuitive, polished, and native to the platform, but you are pragmatic about how to achieve that experience. You understand the tradeoffs between cross-platform and native development and know when abstraction creates leverage and when it gets in the way
• You enjoy solving ambiguous problems and making foundational technical decisions. You are comfortable starting with a blank slate, establishing patterns and standards, and helping grow a team around the architecture you create
• You lead through technical judgment and execution. You are willing to get deeply involved in implementation while also mentoring others, shaping engineering practices, and working closely with Product and Design to create a world-class consumer experience
• 5+ years of software development experience, with significant experience building and operating production mobile applications
• Strong experience building consumer-facing applications for iOS and/or Android
• Demonstrated experience taking a mobile or consumer product from its earliest stages through launch. We are especially interested in people who have helped build commercially successful products from the ground up and have experienced what it takes to evolve them after reaching real users
• Experience leading the architecture and delivery of significant mobile products or major application features
• Strong experience with React Native and the surrounding mobile ecosystem, and/or deep expertise with native iOS or Android development
• Strong understanding of mobile application performance, rendering, memory management, networking, application lifecycle, and device constraints
• Experience with mobile-specific capabilities such as cameras, photo libraries, gestures, animations, push notifications, deep links, and application distribution
• Strong product instincts and exceptional attention to interaction details, responsiveness, and overall user experience
• Proven ability to make high-leverage technical and architectural decisions in ambiguous environments
• An entrepreneurial approach to product development: you are comfortable working with incomplete information, taking initiative outside narrowly defined responsibilities, and doing what is necessary to move the product forward
• Strong focus on execution and delivering product to users
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• A leadership mindset. You take initiative, make decisions, and consistently drive initiatives through to completion
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment where experimentation and adaptability are expected

What the job involves

• Lead the architecture and development of a greenfield iOS and Android consumer application from its earliest stages through launch and scale
• Act as one of the foundational builders of the product, taking broad ownership across technology, product execution, and the decisions required to move from concept to a successful consumer application
• Operate with a high degree of autonomy, rapidly prototyping ideas, validating technical approaches, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and turning ambiguous product opportunities into shipped experiences
• Help make foundational technology decisions, including the appropriate balance between React Native/Expo and native Swift/Kotlin development
• Build a polished, responsive, and highly intuitive consumer experience with a strong focus on performance, usability, interaction design, and attention to detail
• Partner closely with Product and Design to translate ambitious product ideas into exceptional mobile experiences
• Contribute beyond implementation by helping shape product direction, identifying opportunities, challenging assumptions, and using customer feedback and real-world usage to improve the product
• Establish mobile engineering standards, architecture patterns, development workflows, testing strategies, observability, and release processes
• Design and implement core mobile capabilities, including camera and photo library interactions, image-heavy experiences, gestures, animations, sharing, notifications, deep linking, and application lifecycle management
• Identify areas where native platform APIs or implementations provide meaningful advantages and build or guide the development of native modules where appropriate
• Own application performance, reliability, startup time, memory usage, rendering performance, and behaviour across a wide range of iOS and Android devices
• Work closely with backend, computer vision, and AI teams to integrate Leap Tools' existing capabilities into a seamless consumer experience
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, prototyping, and hands-on development
• Mentor engineers and help build out a high-performing mobile engineering team as the product grows
• Help shape our long-term mobile engineering strategy and engineering culture
• Participate in hiring and help define the skills and capabilities required as the team expands
• We are currently leaning toward React Native and Expo because of their development velocity, cross-platform capabilities, and alignment with our existing React and TypeScript expertise
• However, achieving a best-in-class consumer mobile experience is more important to us than standardizing on a particular framework. We are open to building parts of the application—or the application itself—using native Swift/SwiftUI and Kotlin/Jetpack Compose if that produces a meaningfully better product
• Our broader technology stack includes:
• TypeScript, React, Next.js
• Python, Django
• PostgreSQL
• AWS
• Computer vision and generative AI systems

The application process

• You upload your resume and complete a brief questionnaire
• Three rounds of technical assessment
• Culture fit assessment
• Final interview with leadership
• Offer