Principal Android Engineer

Overview

We’re looking for a Principal Android Engineer to set the technical direction for the Arlo Android app and lead the team that builds it. This hands‑on leadership role involves coding, design, mentorship, and setting engineering standards.

• Own the architectural vision of the Android app and guide it from proposal to production—including modularization, state management, navigation, networking, and core patterns.
• Lead by example, shipping meaningful features and platform improvements, setting the standard for code quality through your pull requests.
• Tackle the hardest technical problems on the app: real‑time video streaming, latency, security notifications, background execution, and battery/performance constraints.
• Drive large‑scale refactors and migrations (e.g., to Jetpack Compose, cleaner module graph, modern async patterns) with a pragmatic, incremental plan that keeps the app shippable.
• Define and uphold engineering standards: testing strategy, code review culture, CI/CD, release health, crash‑free rates, and performance budgets.
• Mentor and grow engineers across levels through pairing, design reviews, RFCs, and day‑to‑day technical guidance.
• Partner closely with product, design, backend/firmware, and QA to shape feasibility and sequence work sensibly across teams.
• Make build‑vs‑buy and technology‑selection decisions, documenting the reasoning to enable fast, confident action.
• Champion observability and debuggability—logging, tracing, crash and ANR triage, and tooling that makes production issues findable.

Android & Kotlin depth

• Expert‑level Kotlin, including coroutines and Flow for structured concurrency and reactive state.
• Deep knowledge of the Android framework and platform internals: component life cycles, process death, state restoration, threading, and system scheduling.
• Strong command of Jetpack libraries (Compose, View Model, Navigation, Room, Work Manager, Data Store, Media3/Exo Player).
• Experience with modern app architecture: unidirectional data flow (MVVM/MVI), clean separation of concerns, and well‑defined module boundaries, with judgment to bend the rules when needed.

Architecture & scale

• Proven experience designing and evolving a large, multi‑module Android codebase, including Gradle build configuration and build‑time optimization.
• Dependency injection at scale (Hilt/Dagger) and the trade‑offs involved.
• Track record of leading migrations and refactors in a live, high‑traffic app without halting feature delivery.

Quality & delivery

• Real testing strategy across unit, integration, and UI layers (JUnit, Turbine, Compose testing, Espresso/UI Automator).
• Hands‑on with CI/CD for mobile (build pipelines, automated checks, staged/phased rollouts, feature flags).
• Performance engineering: profiling and fixing jank, memory leaks, slow cold starts, and excessive battery drain using Android Studio profilers, Perfetto, Baseline Profiles, and Macrobenchmark.

Leadership in practice

• Ability to influence without authority—aligning engineers around a direction through clear writing, strong design reviews, and credible code.
• Excellent technical communication, making complex trade‑offs legible to both junior engineers and senior leadership.
• Mentoring instinct and genuine investment in growing people around you.

AI Leadership

• Set the team’s strategy for AI‑assisted development—accelerating boilerplate, testing scaffolding, refactors, documentation, and exploration while maintaining architecture, readability, and maintainability.
• Define guardrails that keep quality high: review standards for AI‑generated code, architectural and security boundaries, and clear ownership expectations.
• Build practices and prompts that let the team reliably benefit from AI tools, and evaluate pilot tooling pragmatically.
• Guard against failure modes—subtle bugs, insecure patterns, architectural drift, and over‑reliance—by enforcing the same testing, review, and design bar as for manually written code.

Nice to Have

• Experience sharing logic or code across iOS and Android.
• Contributions to open source, public technical writing, or conference talks.
• Familiarity with the broader smart‑home ecosystem (Matter, Google…