Principal Engineer, Mobile

ABOUT SLATE

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.

Slate is looking for a Principal Engineer to anchor the technical depth of the Mobile Experience pod. This is the senior‑most individual contributor on the mobile team — the person who shapes architecture, sets the engineering quality bar, and personally closes the hardest technical gaps standing between our current build and a November GA launch. The Slate mobile app covers a wide technical surface: a React Native / Type Script product layer, a custom native module for vehicle communication, a dedicated mobile backend-for-frontend, platform-level security and encryption, and integrations spanning EV charging, service scheduling, account management, and over-the-air update delivery.

You need to be equally comfortable driving complex product features in React Native and reasoning through low‑level native module behavior, and you should be able to step into backend service work when mobile product needs require it. You must be able to thrive and succeed in a fast-paced startup environment where your contributions have a direct impact on the company’s direction and success and should not be hindered by ambiguity or competing priorities.

Serve as the architectural owner of the C++ Turbo Module that bridges the React Native JS layer to the vehicle Secure Gateway Module over USB/DTLS — setting direction, leading design decisions, and being the escalation point for the hardest debugging and performance issues in the native layer.

Own the Type Script/C++ boundary defined by the Turbo Module Codegen spec — vehicle data polling, UDS diagnostic requests, CAN bus messaging, OTA update management, DTC operations, and security access — and ensure the team is building to that contract correctly.

Provide architectural guidance on CAN decoder design and the shared CAN message definitions package; review and approve significant changes to the vehicle communication data model.

Drive the DTLS session lifecycle architecture: certificate issuance, BFF‑mediated vehicle security endpoints, and cryptographic operations within the native layer.

Lead the evaluation and outcome decision on protobuf‑based dynamic DID mapping to align vehicle communication with the source‑of‑truth data model.

Apply and reinforce the Definition of Done for vehicle communication PRs in code reviews; serve as the technical bar for what constitutes a well‑tested, merge‑ready change in the native communication layer.

Own the overall layered application architecture — from Presentation through Native Modules and Data Persistence — making binding calls on structure, patterns, and technology decisions as the app scales toward GA and beyond.

Drive architecture and implementation across active epics: EV Charging, Service Scheduling, Vehicle Settings, and Key Management / Plugged‑In flows; jump into hands‑on implementation where the team needs technical leadership or the problem requires it.

Set the standard for server state management patterns across the app — caching, synchronization, optimistic updates, and stale‑while‑revalidate behavior — and ensure consistent application across charging, vehicle data, and scheduling endpoints.

Own the encrypted local storage architecture and its per‑VIN partitioning scheme; provide direction on schema validation hardening…