Lead Engineer, Activity Apps

Nike•Beaverton, OR

About The Position

The Activity Apps team builds and operates Nike Run Club (NRC) and Nike Training Club (NTC) - the mobile experiences that move millions of Nike athletes through runs, workouts, training plans, and guided coaching every day. As a Lead Engineer, you’ll be one of the senior technical voices on the team, partnering daily with Principal Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product, Design, Sport Science, and squads across iOS, Android, wearables, and the backend services that power activity at Nike. This role reports to the Engineering Manager for Activity Apps and works closely with peers across mobile platform, athlete, and coaching content teams. Nike is seeking a Lead Software Engineer who combines strong architectural instincts with a hands-on delivery mindset and a passion for consumer mobile at scale. You’ll set the technical direction for a squad or a critical feature area within NRC or NTC, lead the design and execution of complex features end-to-end, and elevate the engineers around you through code review, design leadership, and mentorship. The ideal candidate is a senior IC ready to own the hardest problems on the team - background workout reliability, sensor accuracy, watch-to-phone sync, content delivery - and pull the rest of the squad up with them.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience shipping consumer mobile applications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
Expert proficiency in Swift/SwiftUI or Kotlin/Compose (or both), with a track record of delivering features in high-scale consumer apps
Deep experience with the systems that make activity apps work: Core Location / FusedLocationProvider, Core Motion / SensorManager, background execution and lifecycle, audio session management, push and silent-push pipelines, and durable offline session storage
Hands-on experience with companion-device work on watchOS and/or Wear OS - phone-to-watch sync, standalone workouts, state reconciliation
Working familiarity with HealthKit and Health Connect / Google Fit, and integrations with third-party fitness devices and services (Apple Watch, Garmin, Strava-class partners)
Fluency in modern mobile CI/CD, testing, and release practices (Xcode, Gradle, Fastlane, App Store Connect, Google Play, feature flagging, experimentation)
Proven ability to lead technical design reviews, break down ambiguous problems, and drive cross-squad alignment on architecture and standards
Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable authoring design docs and technical strategy for a mixed audience of engineers, product, and design
Experience with Spec Driven Development leveraging LLM coding agents and autonomous build and review loops

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of high-impact features across iOS, Android, and companion wearables - from spec refinement through shipped release and post-launch telemetry
Own the technical health of your area: architecture, code quality, test coverage, performance, crash-free rate, and battery/thermal budgets
Contribute directly to the workout session stack - sensor capture, GPS pipelines, background reliability, recovery from process death, durable upload - so every started workout becomes a saved workout
Drive cross-squad initiatives that consolidate fragmented paths across NRC and NTC, defining reusable patterns and migrating legacy code toward them
Partner with the Principal Engineer and Engineering Manager on multi-quarter technical planning for your area, translating platform strategy into concrete quarterly deliverables
Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and structured feedback; raise the technical bar in code review across the squad
Partner with Security, Privacy, and Platform teams to keep athlete data - location, health, biometric - safe, compliant, and trustworthy
Contribute to communities of practice around Mobile Architecture, Observability, Performance, and Wearables; represent your squad in cross-team technical forums
Adopt and champion AI-native development practices on the team - internal AI tooling, code assistance, evaluation harnesses - and share what’s working with the broader engineering org