Mobile Engineer

Staff Mobile Engineer (Contract)

The Staff Mobile Engineer is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the mobile experience that has become the primary daily touchpoint for our customers. This role involves architecting and leading the development of our React Native application across iOS and Android, driving the technical strategy for mobile, and contributing to the organization's long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, designers, and stakeholders to ship a premium, native-feeling experience for our full e-commerce, appointment, and membership business — while mentoring engineers at all levels and fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

This is also an AI-forward role. We expect our Staff Mobile Engineer to both build AI-powered experiences into the app and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools — while retaining the deep technical skepticism required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships. The base range for this contract position is between $80 and $85/hr, with expectation of 40 hours a week.

At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States.

• Own the mobile platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship our React Native application across iOS and Android, making foundational technical decisions that shape how we deliver the mobile experience to our guests.
• Drive mobile technical strategy. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns.
• Build AI-powered mobile experiences. Bring AI capabilities directly into the hands of customers — surfacing personalized recommendations, powering conversational and agent-driven interactions, and integrating LLM-backed features into native mobile interfaces.
• Leverage the Expo ecosystem as a product advantage. Own EAS build pipelines, configure custom native modules via config plugins without ejecting, and ship over-the-air updates to iterate rapidly. We already maintain native modules for Live Activities, biometric authentication, beacons, AR virtual try-on, and payments — you'll extend and harden these.
• Champion mobile UX and performance. Obsess over the details that make an app feel premium and native: frame rates, navigation transitions, list rendering, keyboard handling, and the accessibility standards required to support a diverse customer base.
• Own reliability in the wild. Treat CI/CD, crash monitoring, analytics, and App Store / Play Store release management as a fundamental part of the job — not an afterthought. Set a high bar through monitoring, error tracking, and optimization.
• Take ownership of large, ambiguous initiatives and break them into actionable work streams. Lead efforts to refactor and optimize large areas of the codebase, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability.
• Mentor and raise the bar. Establish patterns for code reuse, elevate the engineers around you through rigorous code review and testing practices, and foster a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product and leadership to align technical solutions with business priorities, shaping both what gets built and how it gets built.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep, specialized focus on React Native and Expo.
• A proven track record of building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy mobile applications in production at scale.
• Expo and mobile infrastructure expertise. You know how to manage EAS builds, integrate complex native modules without ejecting, ship OTA updates, and navigate the strict review guidelines of the App Store and Google Play.
• Mastery of mobile state and performance. You understand the React render cycle on mobile, know how to prevent UI-thread blocking, optimize list rendering, and…