Lead Software Engineer - Mobile (Android)

Key Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Architecture Own and evolve the Android architecture across apps and SDKs — Gradle module boundaries, dependency graph, state management, navigation, and offline/sync strategy. Make and document consequential technical decisions (Views → Jetpack Compose adoption, third-party dependency selection, persistence and caching strategy, native vs cross-platform) with explicit trade-off analysis and a migration path. Author and drive technical design documents; run design reviews and hold the bar on Clean Architecture, MVVM/MVI, SOLID, and pattern consistency across teams. Lead large-scale refactors and migrations with incremental, low-risk rollout plans — no big-bang rewrites. Identify and remove systemic technical debt; maintain a prioritized architecture backlog reviewed with Product and Engineering Management. SDK Ownership & API Stewardship Own public SDK API design — clean, minimal, hard-to-misuse surfaces, with deliberate decisions about what becomes permanent contract. Own semantic versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation policy; guarantee that host applications can upgrade without breakage. Defend the integration footprint: binary/method-count impact, transitive dependency conflicts with host apps, consumer R8/ProGuard rules, manifest merger behaviour, and minSdk/targetSdk policy. Own SDK integration documentation, sample apps, migration guides, and release notes. Lead technical discussions with customer and partner engineering teams — integration reviews, escalations, and root-cause analysis on their production issues. Maintain parity and consistency of behaviour across Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter SDK variants in partnership with the iOS and cross-platform leads. Delivery & Execution Break down ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives into scoped, sequenced, estimable work for the team. Stay hands-on: personally deliver the highest-risk components, prototypes, and performance-critical paths. Own the release train — versioning, release branching, staged rollouts and halts in Play Console, Play App Signing, kill switches, and rollback procedures for both apps and SDK artifact publishing (Maven Central / internal repositories). Own build and developer productivity: Gradle build times, convention plugins and version catalogs, flaky test elimination, and CI/CD reliability. Drive integration contracts with backend teams for REST and GraphQL APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and error-handling standards. Own annual targetSdk compliance, Play policy and Data Safety obligations, and forward-compatibility work against new Android releases. Quality, Performance & Reliability Define and enforce the quality bar: test strategy across unit, integration, and instrumentation layers; coverage expectations; and mandatory quality gates in CI. Own crash-free session rate, ANR rate, cold-start and frame-timing budgets, App Bundle size, and battery/network efficiency; set targets and report against them. Profile and optimize using Android Studio Profiler, Macrobenchmark, Baseline Profiles, Perfetto, StrictMode, and Play Vitals; lead investigations that cross app, SDK, and backend boundaries. Own correctness across device and OEM fragmentation — background execution limits, doze/battery-optimization behaviour, WorkManager reliability, permission model changes, and vendor-specific quirks. Act as incident commander for production mobile incidents — triage, mitigate, communicate, and run blameless post-mortems with tracked action items. Define observability standards: crash reporting, structured logging, analytics events, feature flags, and remote config (Firebase Crashlytics / Sentry, Remote Config). Mentorship, Collaboration & Influence Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers; grow at least one engineer to the next level through structured feedback and stretch ownership. Own code review culture — set expectations for review depth and turnaround, and coach through reviews rather than gatekeeping. Drive the hiring bar for Android: design and calibrate interview loops, conduct architecture and coding interviews, and support onboarding. Provide input to Engineering Managers on performance, growth, and team composition. Represent Android engineering in cross-functional and cross-org forums; influence platform, design-system, and API decisions made outside your team. Write and evangelize internal standards, playbooks, and documentation; run knowledge-sharing sessions and guild forums. Product & Business Partnership Partner with Product to shape scope and sequencing — surface technical constraints early and propose cheaper paths to the same outcome. Define success metrics with Product (adoption, engagement, crash rate, task completion, SDK integration success rate) and drive iteration based on data. Assess feasibility and effort for new initiatives; provide credible estimates with explicit assumptions and risks. Implement and support compliance of self and team to Freshworks compliance and information security processes, including secure-coding practices, data-handling requirements, and privacy obligations.     Requirements / Must Have: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 6+ years building and shipping production Android applications. 2+ years in a technical leadership role — tech lead, lead engineer, or equivalent — owning architecture and outcomes for a team of engineers. Expert-level Kotlin with strong Java interop; deep command of the Android SDK, framework internals, and the full debugging and profiling toolchain. Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial Android architecture at scale, including multi-module Gradle structure and dependency management. Deep expertise in Coroutines and Flow, structured concurrency, threading, memory management, and diagnosis of leaks, race conditions, and deadlocks. Strong experience with Jetpack Compose and the Views toolkit, plus the Jetpack libraries (Lifec