Director of Application Engineering

Moultrie; Birmingham (AL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Moultrie in Birmingham, Alabama is seeking a Director of App Development to own the quality, evolution, and long-term vision of the software applications and web-based services our customers use every day.

This is a role that blends technical depth with strategic clarity and execution discipline, including evaluating platform choices, guiding dual tracks of product improvement and next-gen development, and expanding web capabilities with the same quality bar as mobile.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 4+ years leading mobile or full-stack engineering teams.
• Proven ability to make platform/architectural decisions with data-informed reasoning.
• Experience managing parallel workstreams without compromising delivery.
• Strong product sense and customer-focused mindset.

Responsibilities

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of ~20 engineers across mobile and web.
• Instill high standards technically, professionally, and in customer empathy.
• Build a culture where quality is a source of pride and supports velocity.
• Manage 3–4 direct reports and invest in their growth as engineering leaders.

Skills

Software engineering

Tech leadership

Mobile development

Web development

Platform strategy

Cross-platform

Team leadership

Tools

MAUI

Xamarin

Flutter

React Native

Job description

Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, Moultrie (www.moultrie.com) is the leader in game feeders and cellular camera innovation, building products used by hunters, property owners, and others for real-time remote monitoring.

We take pride in developing deep user understanding, obsessing about the details, and going the extra mile to show our users we love them. Moultrie is customer-driven – hardware, software, marketing, and customer success teams collaborate to deliver a quality user experience.

We are guided by the following principles: Customer Obsession.; Excellence is the Standard.; Bias for Action.; Act Boldly.; Deliver Results.; Hire and Develop the Best.; Be Curious and Learn.; Win as a Team

The Role:

The Director of App Development owns the quality, evolution, and long-term vision of the software applications and web-based services our customers use every day.

This is the role that customers—and app store ratings—will hold accountable. It is defined by craft, judgment, and a genuine obsession with delivering experiences that delight.

This is not a straightforward leadership role. It carries three compounding challenges requiring a rare combination of technical depth, strategic clarity, and execution discipline:

• Platform Evolution: Our current apps are built on Microsoft MAUI (and Sync Fusion), a cross-platform framework that has enabled development speed but may be limiting the quality ceiling we can reach. This role will lead a first-principles evaluation of our platform strategy—including whether native iOS and Android development is the right path—and own the decision and transition plan that follows.
• Parallel-Track Development: Over the next two years, this role must simultaneously maintain and improve our existing app while prototyping and building a next-generation experience. Both tracks matter. Neither can be sacrificed for the other.
• Web Expansion: We are in the early stages of delivering our app services via web. This role owns that effort alongside mobile, building web features and services that meet the same quality bar as the apps our customers already know.

The right candidate has navigated platform transitions before, knows what great mobile and web experiences look like from the inside, and leads teams to produce work they are proud of.

Key Responsibilities

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of ~20 high-performing software engineers across mobile and web.
• Instill high standards—technically, professionally, and in terms of customer empathy—and challenge the team to reach its potential.
• Build a culture where quality is a source of pride, not a tax on velocity.
• Manage 3–4 direct reports and invest in their growth as engineering leaders.

Technical Leadership

• Make sound, data-informed, defensible technical decisions, especially on high-stakes questions like platform strategy and architectural direction.
• Lead the evaluation of our current MAUI-based approach: assess its long-term viability, model the costs and benefits of alternatives—including native development—and bring a clear recommendation with a credible transition plan.
• Guide the team toward technical excellence and customer delight, even when that means making harder choices.
• Stay close enough to the work to ask the right questions, spot risks early, and maintain credibility with engineers. Get your hands dirty strategically when it matters most.

Platform Strategy & First-Principles Thinking

• Do not accept the limitations of the current app as permanent. Evaluate tools, frameworks, and approaches based on what delivers the best customer experience—not what is most convenient or already in place.
• Own the platform decision for mobile (cross-platform vs. native) and web, and build the roadmap that gets us there without abandoning current customers.
• Bring structure and rigor to technology decisions: document rationale, model tradeoffs, and build organizational confidence in the path forward.
• Maintain and continuously improve the existing app—fixing bugs, improving performance, and shipping features that keep customers engaged.
• Simultaneously prototype, build, and iterate on a new AI-powered app experience integrating voice and chat interfaces with our existing services.
• Own front-end engineering for the new app, ensuring AI-generated information is digestible, actionable, and genuinely useful to customers in the field.
• Manage tension between the two tracks deliberately: protect both, make tradeoffs transparently, and elevate resource conflicts before they become delivery failures.

Billing, Entitlements & Customer Data

• Own engineering systems handling customer billing, ensuring accuracy, security, and compliance with tax collection and remittance obligations.
• Ensure service provisioning and entitlement delivery reliably reflect customer subscriptions.
• Treat customer financial data with the highest standard of protection and proactively lead security practices in this domain.

Web Services Expansion

• Own engineering delivery of our web-based services, building an experience that meets the same quality bar as our mobile apps.
• Partner with Product and UX to define the right feature set and interaction model for web, which may differ meaningfully from mobile.
• Ensure consistency of experience and data across mobile and web.

Quality & Customer Delight

• Hold a high, non-negotiable quality bar across mobile, web, and emerging interfaces.
• Own app store ratings as a meaningful indicator of customer satisfaction; treat trends as a signal, not just a metric.
• Go beyond preventing bugs—push the team to understand what makes an experience genuinely delightful and build that instinct into how the team works.
• Partner closely with the Sr. Manager of QA to establish quality gates, testing standards, and release criteria.

Vision Setting & Product Partnership

• Define and maintain a compelling long-term vision for our app and web service delivery.
• Partner with the Sr. Manager of Product and Director of UI/UX to align engineering direction with product strategy and customer insights.
• Lead planning for app transitions, feature cutover, and end-of-life decisions, ensuring minimal disruption to customers.

Process Optimization

• Establish effective engineering processes that improve quality, predictability, and team throughput without creating bureaucracy.
• Use feedback loops and delivery data to continuously refine how the team works; treat process as a tool, not a rulebook.
• Leverage and actively evangelize our Playbook; contribute when the team learns something worth codifying.
• Partner with the Sr. Manager of Software Delivery & Operations on release processes, planning rhythms, and cross-team coordination.

Business Alignment & Executive Communication

• Partner with Product, UX, and leadership to identify the most important projects and features and drive them to completion.
• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for leadership—and the board as appropriate—on app strategy and delivery.
• Translate technical plans and tradeoffs into clear, non-technical terms and build leadership confidence in the engineering team's direction.
• Advocate for the resources, time, and organizational support needed to deliver at the expected quality bar.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years leading mobile or full-stack engineering teams.
• Deep experience delivering high-quality consumer-facing mobile applications on iOS and/or Android.
• Demonstrated ability to make and defend platform or architectural decisions with clear, data-informed rationale.
• Experience managing parallel workstreams—maintaining existing products while building new ones—without letting either slip.
• Strong product sensibility and a genuine understanding of what makes a mobile experience feel great.
• Track record of improving app quality through real customer signals such as ratings, retention, and support volume.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to represent engineering clearly and credibly to non-technical leaders and partners.

Preferred

• Experience leading or managing a platform migration or cross-platform-to-native transition.
• Familiarity with AI-powered product interfaces, including chat, voice, or LLM-integrated consumer experiences.
• Experience building or scaling web application services alongside a mobile product.
• Background in consumer hardware + software products, connected devices, IoT, or similar environments.
• Experience with Microsoft MAUI, Xamarin, Flutter, React Native, or similar cross-platform frameworks—and a clear-eyed view of their tradeoffs.

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days:

• You have a clear, honest assessment of the current app's quality, technical debt, and team capabilities.
• You have a point of view on platform strategy, with a plan to validate it and build alignment.
• Both the current and future apps are running on clear tracks, with ownership, priorities, and risks visible.
• You have built strong relationships with key partners across Product, UX, QA, Cloud Engineering, and Software Delivery & Operations.

In the first year:

• App store ratings have improved, and customers are noticing.
• The platform strategy is decided, documented, and being executed with confidence.
• The new app POC is live with customers and actively iterating based on real usage data.
• Web services are live and meeting the quality bar of the mobile experience.
• The engineering team is operating at a higher standard—technically and culturally—than when you arrived.