Lead Mobile Engineer - Android

The Trade Me app is one of New Zealand's largest apps and one in three kiwis have the app on their phone. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical and strategic direction of our mobile experience. You will collaborate closely with your Product Owner to drive forward the organisation's objectives. You'll also work closely with Engineering Managers to formulate, and champion the adoption of engineering best practices. Your leadership, technical expertise, and commitment to engineering excellence will be instrumental in ensuring your team's success.

You will exemplify the qualities of a good engineer and will be expected to instil in others these same qualities - through training, mentoring, and generally being available for advice / help. Most importantly, you will build and promote the culture of trust and cooperation between people across the team and organisation to improve team effectiveness and happiness.

Here is what you can expect from this role:

• Assume the mantle of technical leadership and ownership and advocate for the implementation and success of engineering strategic initiatives, ensuring that the team's solutions align with the overarching technical vision and objectives.
• Work with relevant technical leaders to articulate complex technical and architectural designs, and to develop and implement a technical roadmap for your platform.
• Contribute to Trade Me's light-weight governance process by drafting and implementing Guardrails, Guidelines, ADRs, and Tech Radar.
• Liaise with Development Managers to support and mentor engineers in their career progression journey, offer objective feedback for their skill level assessment.
• Actively participate / present in engineering guild and mobile guilds meeting to learn from others around the company and share your knowledge, promoting a culture of engineering excellence.
• Actively advocate and drive Technical Debt management within your immediate squad and organisation and work with the Product Owner to prioritise the remediation plan. Implement, maintain, and drive the remediation plans of your platforms' Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

What you will bring to our team:

• Extensive experience designing and building native Android apps, ideally including time in senior or lead roles.
• Strong expertise in Android native development (Kotlin, Jetpack, Compose).
• Some exposure to iOS native development (Swift/SwiftUI) is a plus.
• Experience with Agile software development methodologies preferred, but not required.
• Experience leading or mentoring other engineers.
• Familiarity with CI/CD for mobile, app observability, or backend integration patterns. Proven ability to ship and maintain large-scale consumer apps.
• Deep understanding of software development principles, architecture, design patterns, and modern technologies.
• Strong technical knowledge for designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable applications.
• Excellent communication, mentoring skills and experience supporting developers in their technical career growth

You'll have the best time working at Trade Me, and this is why: #Flexibility: Flexibility means different things to different people and we support you to find what works, including a home office set up and utilities allowance. We value team connection and come together in person on Monday and at least one other day a week.

#Leave: We support you with leave when you need it, including 5 days of wellness leave each year and 10 days of sick leave from day 1.

#Social: Nothing beats getting together to have some fun and celebrate our success. Join us in the office on payday for company paid lunches. Regular Friday drinks and nibbles, annual Trade Me company awards, celebrations and more.

#Learning: Whether it's on the job, formal training, mentoring or something else, you'll grow with us from Day 1.

Our Commitment to Diversity: We're firm believers that diversity fuels progress. To tackle existing inequality for women in technical leadership, we will be applying a preference for women when filling this role. The successful candidate will of course need to meet the core criteria for the role, and Trade Me will also take a broader perspective weighing up skills and experience alongside other factors such as future potential, diversity and the unique contribution you could make at Trade Me.

Trade Me is an INZ accredited employer. We truly value diversity and embrace a flexible workplace where people are encouraged to achieve their potential.