Mobile Application Developer

Job Title: Mobile Development Lead (iOS / Android / Flutter)Location: Dubai, UAEROLE SUMMARY:We are looking for a hands-on Mobile Development Lead to own the technical direction, quality and delivery of our native and cross-platform mobile applications. This is a player-coach role: you will line-manage and mentor a team of five or more engineers while continuing to write and review production code yourself. You will set the architecture and design-pattern standards for the mobile estate, review and challenge API contracts and process flows with backend and integration teams, translate business requirements into deliverable technical designs with stakeholders, and drive the adoption of modern AI-assisted engineering tooling to raise the team's throughput and code quality. Experience delivering trading or capital-markets applications is a strong advantage.KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:Team Leadership• Lead, mentor and line-manage a team of 5+ mobile engineers across iOS, Android and Flutter; allocate work, set objectives, run one-to-ones and support career development.• Own team capacity planning, estimation and delivery commitments; identify skill gaps and drive hiring, onboarding and upskilling.• Create a culture of engineering excellence, knowledge sharing and constructive peer feedback.Hands-On Engineering• Remain hands-on in the codebase — typically 40–60% of time — delivering complex features, technical spikes, performance-critical components and production fixes.• Define and own the mobile architecture: modularisation, dependency management, shared component libraries and platform abstraction layers.• Select and enforce appropriate design patterns and architectures (MVVM, MVI, Clean Architecture, Repository, Dependency Injection; BLoC / Riverpod / Provider for Flutter) and prevent architectural drift.• Own non-functional requirements: application security, startup and runtime performance, memory and battery efficiency, offline behaviour, accessibility and app-store compliance.Code Quality & Engineering Standards• Conduct code reviews and set the standard for what a good review looks like; define review SLAs, checklists and escalation paths.• Define and enforce coding standards, branching and release strategy, static analysis, linting, and unit/UI test coverage thresholds.• Own the CI/CD pipeline for mobile: automated builds, signing, test execution, distribution to test groups, staged rollouts and feature flags.• Manage technical debt deliberately — track it, size it and negotiate remediation capacity into the roadmap.AI-Assisted Development• Champion the practical adoption of current AI engineering tooling (for example Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and comparable assistants) for code generation, refactoring, test authoring, code review support and documentation.• Establish guardrails for AI-assisted work covering data confidentiality, licensing, security review and human accountability for merged code.• Evaluate emerging tooling and measure its real impact on delivery speed and defect rates.API, Integration & Solution Design• Review, understand and challenge API designs and integration contracts with backend, integration and architecture teams — REST, GraphQL and WebSocket / streaming interfaces.• Assess payload design, versioning, pagination, idempotency, error semantics, authentication and rate limiting from a mobile-client perspective.• Read and validate business process flows, sequence diagrams and state models; identify gaps, edge cases and failure modes before development starts.• Define client-side data strategy: caching, synchronisation, conflict resolution, and handling of high-frequency real-time data such as market prices.Stakeholder Management & Delivery• Work directly with business stakeholders, product owners, UX and QA to elicit, clarify and prioritise requirements, and convert them into epics, stories and acceptance criteria.• Provide realistic estimates, options and trade-offs; communicate scope, dependencies, risks and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.• Own end-to-end release management including App Store and Google Play submissions, review responses, phased rollouts and post-release monitoring.• Report delivery status, quality metrics and risks to engineering and senior management.Design System & User Experience• Partner with the UX/design team to implement and maintain the mobile design system — design tokens, reusable components, typography, spacing, theming (including dark mode) and iconography.• Ensure delivered screens are pixel-accurate to design handoff and comply with platform human interface guidelines and accessibility standards.• Support bilingual and RTL (right-to-left) layouts, localisation and locale-specific formatting for numbers, dates and currencies.REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE:• Minimum 8 years of professional mobile application development experience, including at least 2 years leading or managing a team of 5 or more engineers.• Deep hands-on expertise in native mobile development: iOS (Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit) and/or Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Android SDK).• Strong production experience with Flutter and Dart, including state management, platform channels and native plugin integration.• Proven track record of designing mobile application architecture and enforcing design patterns across a team and a multi-year codebase.• Demonstrated ability to review and reason about API designs, integration contracts and end-to-end process flows.• Strong testing discipline: unit, widget/UI, integration and end-to-end testing; test automation frameworks and quality gates.• Practical CI/CD experience with tooling such as Fastlane, Bitrise, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Azure DevOps, including certificate and provisioning management.• Expert Git workflow knowledge and experience defining branching and release strategies for a team.• Working knowledge of mobile application security: secure storage, certificate pinning, obfuscation, biometric authentication, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT and secure session handling.• Experience implementing and governing a design system, working from Figma or equivalent design handoff, and applying accessibility guidelines.• Demonstrable, current use of AI-assisted coding tools in a professional engineering workflow.• Experience with crash reporting, analytics and performance monitoring tooling (Firebase Crashlytics, Sentry, New Relic, App Store Connect and Play Console metrics).• Strong requirements-gathering and stakeholder-management skills, with excellent written and verbal English communication.• Experience delivering in an Agile / Scrum environment.PREFERRED / ADVANTAGEOUS:• Arabic language proficiency (spoken and written) — strongly preferred.• Experience delivering trading, brokerage, exchange, wealth-management or fintech mobile applications.• Domain understanding of trading concepts: order types and order entry, order book and market depth, watchlists, portfolio and positions, real-time market data feeds, charting libraries (for example TradingView), digital onboarding and KYC journeys, and post-trade views.• Experience handling high-frequency real-time data streams on mobile clients at scale.• Exposure to Kotlin Multiplatform, React Native or other cross-platform frameworks.• Cloud, container and backend familiarity (AWS or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, serverless).• Experience with app modularisation or micro-frontend approaches on mobile.• Track record of published applications with substantial download or active-user volumes.• Awareness of financial-services regulatory, data-protection and information-security obligations.QUALIFICATIONS & EDUCATION:• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline, or equivalent demonstrable experience.• Relevant professional certifications (Apple, Google, cloud platform, Agile) are advantageous.KEY COMPETENCIES• Technical leadership and decision-making under ambiguity.• Pragmatism — balancing engineering quality with delivery deadlines.• Ownership and accountability for outcomes, not just output.• Clear communication across technical and business audiences.• Coaching and developing engineers.• Attention to detail, particularly around quality, security and user experience.