Lead Android Engineer
Contract to Hire
Hybrid – Onsite in Irving, TX (75063) Tue–Thu; Remote Mon & Fri
Our Fortune 500 retail client is seeking a hands-on Lead Android Engineer to drive technical excellence and innovation across their mobile platform. This role will help evolve a mature Android application while delivering high-quality experiences that support millions of customers across eCommerce, loyalty, personalization, and product launches.
The team is focused on differentiating the mobile app from the web experience through personalized content, contextual assistance, and intelligent upsell opportunities. This role requires someone who has made architectural decisions, influenced technical direction, and led implementation — not just executed against predefined designs.
This is not a pure architect role, but it requires strong architectural judgment combined with deep hands-on development expertise.
Key Responsibilities
- Serve as a hands-on technical leader within the Android team.
- Design, build, and enhance Android applications using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
- Make informed architectural decisions within an established Android application using MVVM and Clean Architecture principles.
- Guide the implementation of new features in alignment with scalable, maintainable architecture standards.
- Partner closely with the Mobile Architect while owning day-to-day technical decision-making for the Android team.
- Act as the go-to technical resource for Android engineers, helping answer implementation questions and remove blockers.
- Integrate and manage third-party SDKs and libraries, understanding dependency management, versioning conflicts, and potential performance implications.
- Implement API integrations and evaluate libraries needed to support new functionality.
- Contribute to proof-of-concepts (POCs) that explore innovative mobile capabilities and customer engagement strategies.
- Develop personalization features that differentiate the app experience from the web.
- Implement and optimize push notification capabilities to drive engagement and upsell opportunities.
- Strengthen application stability by implementing unit tests and embedding automated quality checks within the CI/CD pipeline from the Android codebase.
- Participate in production incident management and provide technical leadership during issue resolution.
- Conduct thorough PR reviews, promote code quality standards, and ensure proper documentation.
- Leverage AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to improve efficiency and elevate engineering practices.
- Stay current with Android ecosystem trends and proactively recommend improvements.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of hands-on Android development experience.
- 5+ years of Kotlin development experience.
- Strong experience with Jetpack Compose.
- Proven experience making architectural decisions within an existing Android application.
- Hands-on experience implementing MVVM and Clean Architecture principles.
- Experience integrating third-party SDKs and adding libraries within complex Android projects.
- Experience implementing REST API integrations and managing dependencies.
- Strong unit testing experience and experience improving application stability.
- Experience contributing to accessibility (ADA) improvements.
- Hands-on experience with Google Play Console, including publishing and maintaining Android applications.
- Experience working in Agile development environments.
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship and able to convert to a full-time W-2 employee upon completion of the contract.
Technical Skills
- Kotlin, Android Studio, Jetpack Compose
- MVVM, Clean Architecture
- Hilt, Gradle
- JSON, REST APIs
- SDK & third-party library integration
- Firebase, Crashlytics, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics
- Push Notifications
- CI/CD integrations at the Android application level
- AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot)
Work Environment
- Hybrid schedule (Irving, TX)
- On-call support may be required.
- Occasional weekend or evening work may be required.
