Lead Android Engineer

Title: Lead Android Engineer


Contract/Perm: 12-18m contract to start (idea is to convert to FTE)

Location: Austin preferred, Southlake, Denver

Our client is seeking a hands-on Lead Android Engineer to deliver modern native Android capabilities for high-visibility client mobile experiences. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can lead complex feature delivery while improving shared platform capabilities, technical practices, and team effectiveness.

The role operates in an enterprise environment where reliability, security, accessibility, performance, thoughtful rollout, and client trust are essential. Candidates must be able to work effectively in an established architecture, make pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and coordinate delivery across product, design, quality, platform, security, and backend partners

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of professional native Android development experience, including ship ping complex applications to production.
• Strong, recent hands-on experience with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Android SDK, Android Jetpack libraries, Gradle, REST APIs, and modern Android architecture patterns.
• Demonstrated experience personally designing, implementing, testing, releasing, and supporting meaningful production Android features in an enterprise-scale application.
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams with sprint planning, estimation, execution, dependency coordination, and release planning.
• Ability to explain technical decisions, alternatives, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through code reviews, design reviews, mentoring, engineering standards, technical influence, or leading delivery across team boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a SAFe or Agile Release Train environment, including PI planning, dependency tracking, and cross-team release coordination.
• Experience in regulated, security-conscious, financial-services, or other high-avail ability environments.
• Production experience with feature flags, staged rollouts, experimentation, kill switches, analytics, crash reporting, logging, and performance monitoring.
• Experience with modular Android applications, CI/CD, build optimization, release automation, and automated testing.
• Responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools for code generation, refactoring, testing, debugging, documentation, or design exploration, with appropriate human validation.

A successful candidate is more than a reliable feature developer. They remain hands-on in the code while creating leverage beyond their assigned work. They should demonstrate:

• Broad technical impact: Improves shared Android platform capabilities, libraries, architecture, quality practices, build/release workflows, or developer productivity in addition to delivering features.
• Cross-team influence: Builds alignment and unblocks delivery across engineering, product, design, quality, platform, security, and backend partners without relying on formal authority.
• Sound technical judgment : Understands existing design constraints before recommending changes; weighs delivery, scalability, reliability, security, testability, and long-term maintenance.
• Ambiguity ownership: Can turn unclear requirements, technical debt, migrations, research, or architectural problems into an actionable plan with risks, dependencies, and decisions clearly communicated.
• Operational ownership: Plans for testing, accessibility, observability, safe rollout, performance, failure behavior, and production support-not only implementation.
• Credible delivery: Follows through on commitments, raises risks early, communicates clearly, and focuses on client impact and measurable outcomes