Lead Mobile Engineer

Role:
Lead Mobile Engineer
Salary: £80,000 - £90,000 + annual performance bonus + stock

Location:

Lancaster University, 4 days/week preferred, 2 days/week minimum
Relocation:
Relocation package available
Reporting into: CTO (Head of Software currently vacant)
Progression to:
Head of Software
Start: ASAP

Quantum Base exists to make quantum science useful. Founded at Lancaster University in 2015 by Professor Robert Young, we have spent a decade solving a problem the security industry had accepted as unsolvable: authentication that is impossible to copy, clone or fake, yet simple enough for anyone to use.

Our core technology, Q-®, is an authentication fingerprint built on quantum physics that anyone can authenticate in under three seconds with the smartphone already in its pocket. Impossibly simple. Atomically secure.

Q-® is protected by more than 40 patents, has undergone independent adversarial testing, and is already protecting around two billion products worldwide across tax stamps, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, luxury goods, FMCG, automotive, aerospace, secure documents and more. We work with printers and brands to make quantum technology practical and accessible for any product, anywhere in the world.

Quantum Base is headquartered in Lancaster and listed on the London Stock Exchange (LON: QUBE) in 2025. See Q-® in action:

Mobile is the front door to the Q- authentication, whether it’s a customs officer scanning a tax stamp, a partner embedding Q- into their own app, or a consumer checking a product is genuine, happens on a smartphone. These authentications happen in variable real-world conditions, on a wide range of devices. We are looking for a hands‑on engineering leader to own that surface end‑to‑end.

The Lead Mobile Engineer will be responsible for leading and managing the mobile engineering team, with a tech stack spanning (in order of importance):

• Native iOS (Swift, SwiftUI, AV Foundation, Core ML, Vision)
• Native Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, CameraX, ML Kit, Tensor Flow Lite)
• Computer vision and on‑device ML for Q-
• Mobile SDK design and distribution, for partners embedding Q- their own apps
• Cross platform integrations like .NET MAUI
• Integration with our AWS verification APIs

This is a senior leadership position for someone who is still in the code day‑to‑day. Q- is a computer‑vision problem running on a consumer device in unpredictable lighting, on substrates ranging from paper tax stamps to gold blister packs. Small mobile improvements (scan speed, false‑reject rate, camera handling) have outsized commercial impact and are often the difference between winning and losing a customer.

The role is varied and includes:

• Own the technical direction for mobile at Quantum Base.
• Help define roadmaps that align with the commercial pipeline .
• Set the bar for scan performance, reliability and device coverage.
• Build a culture of fast iteration, measured against real scan data, not just unit tests.
• Encourage the use of modern best practices and AI tooling

• Lead, mentor and grow the mobile engineering team.
• Recruit and retain strong mobile talent; build a team that is comfortable working alongside physicists, mathematicians and ML specialists.
• Partner closely with the cloud team, R&D team and the commercial team.

• Be hands‑on across complex mobile problems — camera pipelines, image preprocessing, on‑device inference, SDK packaging, app‑store release engineering.
• Raise the engineering bar on code quality, automated testing (including on‑device and real‑substrate testing), CI/CD for mobile, crash and performance monitoring.
• Own the mobile SDK contract with partners.
• Work with product, design, algorithms and customer implementation to…