Principal, Software Engineer

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. This role partners directly with Directors, Architects, Product Managers, Designers, Sport Science, and engineering squads across iOS, Android, wearables, and the backend services that power activity at Nike. This role reports to the Director of Engineering for Activity Apps and collaborates across mobile platform, athlete, coaching content, and developer experience functions globally. Nike is seeking a Principal Software Engineer who brings architectural depth, technical authority, and a passion for transforming how mobile activity experiences get built at consumer scale. The successful candidate has a proven track record of leading consumer mobile applications, influencing cross-functional technical strategy across iOS and Android, and mentoring senior engineers toward higher standards. This role requires someone who thinks in systems, drives modern mobile development practices, and can bridge long-term platform vision with day-to-day execution. The ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity, takes ownership of the hardest technical problems - the always-on workout session, the sensor that disagrees with itself, the watch that has to keep working when the phone dies - and leaves the apps measurably better than they found them.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent combination of education, experience or training
Expert-level proficiency in one or more of Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin/Compose, or modern cross-platform stacks (KMP), with a strong record of shipping consumer mobile applications at significant scale (10M+ MAU)
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
At least 5 years of hands-on experience architecting companion-device experiences on watchOS and/or Wear OS, including phone-to-watch sync, standalone workouts, and state reconciliation
Working knowledge of health and fitness data platforms - HealthKit, Health Connect / Google Fit - and third-party device integrations (Apple Watch, Garmin, Strava-class partners)
Deep experience with mobile CI/CD ecosystems, build and release tooling (Xcode, Gradle, Fastlane, App Store Connect, Google Play), experimentation infrastructure, and developer experience optimization for mobile teams
Demonstrated ability to lead technical architecture reviews, establish engineering standards, and influence decisions across multiple teams and platforms

Responsibilities

Design end-to-end architecture for NRC and NTC across iOS, Android, and companion wearables - ensuring session reliability, sensor accuracy, battery efficiency, security, and scale
Own the long-term shape of the workout session stack - sensor capture, GPS pipelines, background reliability, recovery from process death, and durable upload - so that every started workout is a saved workout
Lead technical strategy for the companion-device experience on Apple Watch and Wear OS: standalone workouts, phone-to-watch sync, fallback behaviors, and the architectural seams that let watch features ship independently
Drive consolidation of fragmented legacy code paths across NRC and NTC by evaluating existing systems, defining migration paths, and engineering their replacement with efficient, reusable solutions
Establish traceability models that connect athlete experience through development workflows to production telemetry - session completion, accuracy, time-to-first-mile, crash-free rate - and measurable engineering outcomes
Partner with Security, Privacy, and Platform teams to ensure activity data - location, health, biometric - meets Nike’s standards for resilience, compliance, and athlete trust
Mentor and elevate senior and lead engineers through design reviews, architectural guidance, and direct technical engagement across multiple squads on both platforms
Champion communities of practice in Mobile Architecture, Observability, Performance, AI/ML for coaching personalization, Wearables, and OpenSource - growing Nike’s mobile engineering culture to best-in-class industry standards
Influence and contribute to Nike’s multi-year activity platform roadmap by identifying emerging technology opportunities - on-device ML, sensor fusion, adaptive coaching, new wearable surfaces - and building the case for strategic technical investments
Champion AI native development practices, demonstrating the art of the possible for software teams while keeping up on the latest developments in AI native software development and systems