Mobile Development Lead

Staff Connect Information Technology Consultants; Dubai; On-site; AED 360,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

Staff Connect Information Technology Consultants is seeking a Mobile Development Lead in Dubai, UAE to own the technical direction and delivery of native and cross‑platform mobile apps. You will line‑manage a team of five engineers while continuing to contribute code and drive architecture standards.

You will oversee API contracts, design system governance, and ensure security, performance and accessibility. Strong leadership, English communication, and agile experience are essential.

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of professional mobile development experience with leadership experience.
• Deep hands-on native mobile development expertise (iOS/Swift, UIKit, SwiftUI and/or Android/Kotlin).
• Strong Flutter and Dart experience including state management and plugin integration.
• Proven track record designing mobile architectures and enforcing design patterns across teams.
• Ability to review API designs, contracts and end-to-end flows with backend teams.
• Solid testing discipline across unit/widget/integration tests and automation.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Fastlane, Bitrise, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) and provisioning management.
• Genuine stakeholder communication and English proficiency; agile/scrum experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of five mobile engineers across iOS, Android and Flutter.
• Remain hands-on 40‑60% of the time delivering complex features and performance‑critical components.
• Define and own mobile architecture, modularisation and platform abstractions.
• Enforce design patterns, coding standards and release strategies; maintain quality gates.
• Review API designs and ensure secure, scalable integration with backend services.
• Drive AI-assisted tooling adoption to raise throughput and code quality.

Skills

Team Leadership

Hands-on Engineering

Mobile Architecture

Design Patterns

CI/CD

Flutter

Swift

Kotlin

MVVM/MVI/Clean Architecture

API Design & Integration

AGILE/SCRUM

English Communication

AI-assisted tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Firebase Crashlytics

Sentry

New Relic

App Store Connect

Play Console

Bitrise

Fastlane

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Azure DevOps

Kubernetes

Job description

Job Title: Mobile Development Lead

Location: Dubai, UAE

Role 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 five 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.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Minimum 8 years of professional mobile application development experience, including at least 2 years leading or managing a team of five 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:

• 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.

Additional Points:

• 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.