Telematics Mobile Engineer - Android & iOS

Location: Newcastle upon Tyne

## Telematics Mobile App Developer Apply locations:
Home - UK
- England time type:
Full time posted on:
Posted Todaytime left to apply:
End Date:
August 31, 2026 (30+ days left to apply) job requisition :
R0017973#
** Who are we?
** Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.
** About the role
** We build the Android and iOS apps that turn an ordinary phone into a motion sensor for insurance telematics. When a driver gets into their car, the app detects it, records the journey in the background, and uploads it for scoring - with no interaction from the user s is an Android-first role - where you’d spend most of your time - but you’d join the small team that owns both apps end to end: recording engine, trip lifecycle, upload pipeline, and the app the customer actually sees.
** What you’d be working on*
* · Background journey recording. Foreground services, Activity Recognition and geofencing, surviving Doze, App Standby and aggressive OEM power management. The same battle plays out on iOS - Core Location region monitoring, significant location change, background modes.
· BLE beacon detection of a device in the customer’s own vehicle.
· Sensor capture and trip assembly. GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope streams written to disk, compiled into a journey, packaged and uploaded reliably.
· Permission integrity. Ensuring required permissions are always granted and the user notified ASAP if not.
· The customer-facing app: dashboard, journey history and maps, mileage, discounts, onboarding and login - Jetpack Compose on Android, SwiftUI/UIKit on iOS.
· Release engineering: white-label builds for more than one brand, and staged rollouts.
** What we’re looking for
**** Essential*
* · Strong commercial Android experience in Kotlin, with Coroutines and Flow. You’d also help maintain the iOS app, so you’ll need the appetite to work in Swift.
· Real experience of background execution and its failure modes - foreground services, Work Manager, Alarm Manager, broadcast receivers, and why they silently stop firing.
· Comfort with the Android runtime permission model, particularly background location.
· Modern Android UI and architecture:
Jetpack Compose, structured concurrency with Coroutines and Flow, DI, local persistence, an HTTP client.
· The instinct to write tests for concurrency, not just happy paths. Most of what breaks here is a race, a lifecycle edge, or a restart mid-flight.
· Practical fluency with AI coding agents, and a clear-eyed view of what they’re bad at. We use them regularly, and we want someone who prompts deliberately, knows when to stop and do it by hand, and reviews the output critically.
· Willingness to debug from evidence - device logs, CSV traces, ANR and crash reports - and add relevant and targeted logging to catch a future problem.
** Desirable*
* · Existing iOS experience - Swift, SwiftUI/UIKit, and the Core Location-driven background model. You’d pick this up on the job regardless, but knowing it already is a real plus.
· Prior work in telematics, IoT, fitness/activity tracking, or navigation - anything that runs unattended and drains a battery is the closest analogue to what we do.
· BLE and the ways both Bluetooth stacks disappoint you.
· Location and sensor fusion, GPS accuracy, filtering noisy signals.
· Firebase - Crashlytics, Analytics and Remote Config - and using production telemetry to chase down the bugs you can’t reproduce on your own desk.

You don’t need an insurance background.
** How we work
** Small team, direct ownership. You’d take tickets end to end - investigate, fix, write…