Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Mobile Apps Engineer

💰 $95,000 - $175,000

EngineeringTechnologySoftware Development

🎯 Role Definition

A Mobile Apps Engineer is a specialized software developer who conceives, designs, and creates innovative applications for mobile devices. This role is at the heart of the user's interaction with our brand, requiring a blend of technical expertise, creative problem-solving, and a deep understanding of the user experience. You will be responsible for the entire mobile application lifecycle, from brainstorming initial concepts with product and design teams to writing clean, efficient code, and finally, deploying and maintaining the app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Success in this role means delivering stable, intuitive, and performant mobile experiences that delight our users and drive business goals.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Associate Mobile Developer
  • Software Engineer (with a focus on front-end or a desire to specialize in mobile)
  • Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer with strong automation skills

Advancement To:

  • Senior Mobile Apps Engineer
  • Mobile Architect or Principal Mobile Engineer
  • Engineering Manager (Mobile Team Lead)

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager (specializing in Mobile Products)
  • DevOps Engineer (focusing on mobile CI/CD pipelines)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, develop, and maintain high-performance, reusable, and reliable code for our native iOS (Swift/Objective-C) and/or Android (Kotlin/Java) applications.
  • Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, UI/UX designers, and backend engineers, to define, design, and ship new user-facing features.
  • Translate complex design mockups and wireframes from tools like Figma or Sketch into high-quality, pixel-perfect, and fully functional code.
  • Architect and build advanced, scalable mobile applications from the ground up, ensuring they are robust and flexible enough for future iterations.
  • Own the entire development lifecycle for specific features, from initial concept and technical design to development, testing, and deployment.
  • Proactively identify and correct performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, and other bugs to ensure a smooth and responsive user experience.
  • Implement and maintain robust unit, integration, and UI tests to ensure code quality, stability, and long-term maintainability.
  • Integrate with backend services by consuming and shaping RESTful or GraphQL APIs, and work with the backend team to define API contracts.
  • Manage the application's submission process to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, including handling certificates, provisioning profiles, and store metadata.
  • Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs while actively providing constructive feedback to create a better end-product.
  • Write and maintain comprehensive technical documentation for new and existing features to facilitate knowledge sharing and onboarding.
  • Continuously discover, evaluate, and implement new technologies, libraries, and development standards to maximize development efficiency and application performance.

Secondary Functions

  • Participate actively in code reviews, providing and receiving constructive feedback to uphold high standards of code quality across the team.
  • Mentor junior engineers, offering guidance on mobile development best practices, architectural patterns, and effective problem-solving techniques.
  • Contribute to the evolution of our mobile CI/CD pipeline to automate builds, testing, and deployments, improving team velocity and reliability.
  • Stay current with the latest platform-specific guidelines, trends, and upcoming features from Apple (WWDC) and Google (Google I/O).
  • Investigate and prototype new mobile technologies and frameworks (e.g., SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, Kotlin Multiplatform) to assess their potential for future projects.
  • Assist in troubleshooting and resolving production issues, providing timely support and clear communication to stakeholders.
  • Collaborate with the data science team to implement analytics, A/B testing, and event tracking to gather user insights and validate hypotheses.
  • Champion accessibility standards (WCAG) within the mobile applications, ensuring our products are usable by people with a wide range of abilities.
  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-Level Programming: Deep proficiency in modern mobile languages, specifically Swift and/or Kotlin. Experience with Objective-C and Java is also highly valued.
  • Platform-Specific SDKs: Extensive experience with the iOS SDK (UIKit, SwiftUI, Core Data, Core Animation) and/or the Android SDK (Jetpack Compose, LiveData, Room, Coroutines).
  • Architectural Patterns: Strong understanding and practical application of mobile architectural patterns such as MVVM, MVI, VIPER, or Clean Architecture to build scalable and maintainable apps.
  • API Integration: Proven ability to work with remote data via RESTful APIs and JSON, with experience in libraries like Alamofire/URLSession or Retrofit/OkHttp. GraphQL experience is a plus.
  • Version Control: Mastery of Git, including branching, merging, pull requests, and resolving conflicts in a collaborative team environment.
  • Testing Frameworks: Hands-on experience with mobile testing frameworks such as XCTest/XCUITest for iOS and JUnit/Espresso for Android.
  • Cross-Platform Frameworks (Optional but valued): Familiarity with cross-platform technologies like React Native or Flutter can be a significant advantage.
  • Dependency Management: Proficiency with tools like Swift Package Manager/CocoaPods for iOS and Gradle for Android.

Soft Skills

  • Problem-Solving Mindset: A natural curiosity and tenacity for digging into complex problems, identifying the root cause, and implementing robust solutions.
  • Collaboration & Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • User Empathy: A keen eye for detail and a passion for creating intuitive, beautiful, and accessible user experiences. You think from the user's perspective.
  • Adaptability: The ability to thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment and adapt quickly to changing priorities and new technologies.
  • Ownership Mentality: A proactive and responsible approach to your work, taking ownership of features from start to finish.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience demonstrated through a strong portfolio.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3-7 years of professional experience in developing, releasing, and maintaining native mobile applications on either iOS or Android.

Preferred:

  • Experience having shipped one or more applications to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. A portfolio of published applications is highly desirable.
  • Experience working within an Agile/Scrum development methodology.
Explore More Careers