Principal Mobile Application Developer

SharkNinja•Needham, MA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

At SharkNinja, we create intelligent, connected products that delight consumers and disrupt categories. We are building systems that integrate hardware, software, and digital experiences using AI-driven processes to help accelerate design, coding, and testing. This is a senior individual-contributor role with full ownership of the mobile app's architecture and the support of new products as they come to the app. You will own the architecture behind how SharkNinja products come to life in the app — the feature architecture, the device experiences, the connectivity flows, and the consumer-facing quality of what is built on it — and partner with product teams to bring new products onto it. You are the technical decision-maker for the app's architecture: you decide how it is built, you set the standards it is held to, and you are accountable for how it performs in real consumers' homes. You will also establish and document engineering patterns and best practices in coordination with the App Architect, so the way we build is consistent, repeatable, and easy to adopt across products. Together, we're making our products feel smarter every day they're in the home.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field; advanced degree welcome but not required.
8+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in React Native and TypeScript for iOS and Android at consumer scale.
A track record of owning the architecture of a mobile app used by large numbers of consumers, from design through launch and long-term support.
Demonstrated technical leadership — you set technical direction, bring others along through design and code review, and are trusted as the decision-maker within your scope.
Strong understanding of full-stack system architecture and mobile-to-cloud integration patterns, including API contract design, client-side caching and cache invalidation, real-time state synchronization, and failure and retry behavior across unreliable connections.
Fluency with the mobile toolchain and release pipeline: Xcode, Android Studio, Git, Gradle, CocoaPods, Swift Package Manager, CI/CD, staged rollout, and production diagnostics.
Native depth in Swift and/or Kotlin sufficient to debug across the bridge and implement platform-specific behavior when a product needs it.
Sound judgment about when to build, reuse, or replace — and the discipline to leave the code well documented and understood.
A passion for creating consumer-friendly, connected product experiences.
Curiosity, adaptability, and a drive to be part of an A-Player engineering team.

Nice To Haves

Depth in the Expo ecosystem — Expo Router and typed routes, config plugins, custom native modules — plus TanStack Query, Reanimated, and Xcode/Android Studio build systems.
Experience with binary protocol work: parsing and versioning device payloads, and evolving a protocol without breaking already-shipped firmware.
Substantial experience with connected devices, IoT ecosystems, or device-to-app connectivity in production.
Hands-on experience with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and WiFi provisioning, including the failure modes that only appear in real homes.
Experience with Rust, C/C++, or other systems programming languages, and comfort working alongside firmware teams.
Background in robotics, consumer electronics, or smart home products.
Experience launching a new hardware product's app experience from zero to shipped.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate design, coding, and testing without sacrificing quality.

Responsibilities

Own the mobile app architecture that new products are built on — feature architecture, device experiences, pairing and provisioning flows, and consumer-facing behavior from first launch through steady state.
Make the architecture and technology decisions for the mobile app, and remain deeply hands-on building in React Native, Expo, and TypeScript.
Own how new products enter the app through our capability-based device definitions — declaring what a product is and what it can do, so screens compose from capabilities rather than per-product special cases.
Serve as the mobile technical authority for onboarding and supporting new products, working with embedded, cloud, hardware, and product partners to define how a new device behaves in the app and to drive the tradeoffs that surface during development.
Define the reusable components, patterns, and libraries needed to deliver these experiences, and decide what gets built, refactored, or replaced — extending our layered component library and semantic theming system rather than accumulating one-off UI.
Establish, document, and own engineering patterns and best practices for the mobile app in coordination with the App Architect, and drive their adoption across teams so products are built consistently.
Own quality end to end: test and automation strategy, crash and performance targets, staged rollout, and the field issues that come back from real homes.
Lead the hardest technical problems personally — BLE and WiFi connectivity reliability, versioned device protocols, real-time state over WebSocket, and the bugs that only reproduce on real hardware.
Lead technical research and proof-of-concept validation, running pre-research and building prototypes to de-risk major architectural decisions before committing to full-scale production.
Mentor mid-level and senior engineers through design review, code review, and pairing, and grow their ability to own features independently.
Collaborate across regions with distributed global teams, including the UK and China, to align technical roadmaps, share patterns, and keep delivery coordinated across time zones.
Champion AI-assisted workflows and build AI skills across the broader engineering team through shared practices, tooling, and coaching, going beyond personal tool use.
Write the design docs for significant features, drive the decisions to closure, and be accountable for how they hold up in production.