Senior Mobile Developer (Contract)

Cardata

5d•Remote

About The Position

Cardata is hiring a Senior Developer with deep mobile expertise for a small, self-contained innovation group. The initial engagement is a three-month contract, with an opportunity for extension or transition to full-time. Working with a Product Manager and a web-focused developer, the role turns ambiguous business problems into testable product bets and builds small end-to-end experiences to generate evidence, often within one to two weeks. The developer brings early versions to customers and the market validation group, gathers feedback, and iterates rapidly. Once a concept is validated, the group determines what is needed to make it secure, reliable, scalable, and ready for handoff to the core product and engineering team. The group works like an entrepreneurial startup within Cardata, owning work from problem discovery through prototyping, customer and market validation, iterative development, and proof of concept. The approach is to build to learn first and then build to scale: use deliberate, reversible technical choices during validation while maintaining security, privacy, and responsible data handling. For validated ideas, the developer works with the Core team at key integration points to harden, refactor, or redesign as needed. The role requires strong product and commercial instincts, sound technical judgment, and ownership. The developer is expected to identify gaps, propose a path forward, maintain momentum without perfect requirements, make clear trade-offs to meet timelines, and raise consequential risks early.

Requirements

6–8 years as a software engineer at a senior level, with a track record of product work at startups and in fast-paced environments.
Experience building from nothing, cutting scope under time pressure, and shipping.
Ability to make progress in ambiguous situations, including unfamiliar domains and under-specified problems, without waiting for a specification.
Strong product thinking, connecting driver and administrator needs, commercial value, and technical choices across mobile and web.
Strong communication skills, including identifying gaps, proposing a path forward, and keeping work moving.
High ownership, sound judgment under time pressure, and a track record of delivering against commitments while communicating material trade-offs.
Comfort working in a small, autonomous group where priorities can change as new evidence emerges.
High comfort with React Native, as well as native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) development.
Familiarity with the full mobile release process for iOS and Android, including store submission and review.
Experience integrating with REST/backend APIs and handling authentication, tokens, and SSO on device.
Ability to collaborate across mobile, web, and backend boundaries to create a coherent product experience.
Ability to adopt existing patterns and conventions of the mobile codebase rather than introducing unrelated ones.
Ability to reason about software design, architecture, and trade-offs rather than relying only on AI-generated output.
Use of modern AI development workflows and tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or Copilot.
Understanding of AI skills, agents, and code-spec workflows, and how to use them while maintaining engineering rigour.
Ability to use AI to accelerate prototyping and maintain quality during hardening.

Nice To Haves

Ability to flex onto the Portal stack: TypeScript, Next.js, NestJS, and PostgreSQL.

Responsibilities

Work with the Project Lead, Product Manager, and Web Developer to turn ambiguous problems into unified driver-and-admin experiences.
Build the smallest end-to-end prototype that can test an idea, often within one to two weeks.
Present prototypes to customers and the market validation group, then rapidly translate feedback into subsequent versions.
Challenge assumptions, reduce scope, and keep the group moving without waiting for perfect requirements.
Make deliberate, reversible technical choices during validation while protecting security, privacy, and data integrity.
Build within the shared codebase, using feature flags and isolated modules that can be removed cleanly.
Integrate with the platform backend and third-party APIs using existing contracts and patterns.
After a concept is validated, identify and complete the work required to harden, scale, test, and release it.
Prepare validated features and technical context for a clean handoff to the core product and engineering team.