Senior Native Mobile Engineer, Mode Mobile

• You are passionate about giving people private, secure, and unrestricted access to the internet. You care about your users and the trust they place in the product
• You’re an expert in smartphone technology and love mobile application software, equally comfortable shipping on Android and iOS, and you are not afraid to go below the app layer into VPN tunnels, network extensions, and platform APIs
• You know how to integrate and debug native libraries (.aar / .framework) written in other languages, and you don't need to be a Go expert, but you should be comfortable reading Go and debugging across the mobile/native-library boundary when investigating VPN issues
• You enjoy inheriting an existing product, reading unfamiliar code, and reverse-engineering how things work, then making them better with tests, documentation, and refactoring
• You embrace agentic AI as a force multiplier: you use AI coding agents to plan, implement, test, and review work, and you know when to trust them and when to verify
• You value working closely with Product Management, learning directly from users about what matters to them, and developing solutions that they love
• You care deeply about the impact of your work, and measure success by the value added to users’ lives: connection success rate, time-to-connect, crash-free sessions, and subscription conversion
• You’re excited to write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code that you deliver. You are eager to find minimal ways to test hypotheses and validate feasibility
• You’re a strong advocate for unit/integration testing and passionate about automated testing and continuously shipping to production on both app stores, replacing day-long manual regression with automation
• You are security-minded: secure storage of tokens and keys (Keychain, EncryptedSharedPreferences), certificate handling, and user privacy are part of everyday engineering, not an afterthought
• 5+ years of professional senior mobile engineering experience in an agile environment delivering native applications to end-users on both Android and iOS, with hands-on production experience using:
• Android: Kotlin (and Java), Jetpack Compose and XML views (including migrating legacy XML to Compose), Coroutines, Flow, Koin, Dagger/Hilt, Retrofit, Room, WorkManager, foreground services
• IOS: Swift, UIKit and SwiftUI (including incremental UIKit-to-SwiftUI migration), Swift Concurrency (async/await), RxSwift + RxCocoa, Combine, Core Data or equivalent, Keychain
• Platform networking and VPN APIs: Android VpnService, iOS NetworkExtension / Packet Tunnel Provider, always-on VPN, kill switch, split tunneling, and integrating native libraries (.aar / .framework / XCFramework) into mobile apps
• GitHub for version control and pull-request based workflows
• SOLID, Clean Coding, Testing, experience with automation and instrumentation (Espresso/UI Automator, XCTest/XCUITest)
• Publishing and maintaining apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store, including release management, store compliance for VPN apps, and handling review rejections
• Working knowledge of VPN protocols and networking fundamentals: WireGuard, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks or similar, TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, and how packets flow from a mobile OS tunnel interface to a proxy or VPN server
• Experience with subscription and in-app purchase flows (StoreKit 2, Google Play Billing, RevenueCat or similar), paywalls, free trials, and integrating attribution and analytics SDKs (Amplitude, Firebase, AppsFlyer/Adjust or similar)
• Agentic AI proficiency: demonstrated day-to-day use of AI agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot agents) to write and review infrastructure code, automate runbooks, and investigate incidents, with strong judgment on verifying AI-generated output before it touches production
• You’re a candid and empathetic communicator that is excited to join a startup that enjoys leveling up a company
• You have exceptional organizational and analytical skills leading to confident independent delivery, but know when and how to include others
• You have experience building large-scale consumer apps with some technical leadership skills
• Passionate about Technology and keeping up to date with latest advancements, techniques and best practices
• Accountable: You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follow through on commitments and strive for continuous improvement
• Action-driven: Identify what is most important, agree on scope, timely execute, and drive the greatest impact. You take initiative, roll up your sleeves, and get things done
• Caring: You genuinely care about yourself and others, our business and craft, our mission and vision, and are passionate in heart and mind. You understand the importance of our team and strive to create a positive, supportive work environment
• Curious: You focus on the ‘why,’ learn and expand your knowledge, explore new ideas, and generally make things better. You're a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge and a constant desire to improve
• Thorough: Your work is thoughtful, impactful, timely, accurate, and complete. You pay attention to detail, are meticulous, and ensure quality work and compliance

Desirable

• Mode.Inc is looking for a Senior Native Mobile Engineer to join the team taking ownership of our newly acquired VPN product and the additional apps we will be acquiring
• You will own the Android and iOS mobile domain end-to-end: a consumer VPN with 10M+ installs, 1,000+ servers in 45+ countries, and users in some of the most restrictive network environments in the world
• This is an ownership-heavy role: you'll inherit existing mobile codebases, understand how the apps interact with the VPN networking stack, close knowledge gaps from the acquired team, improve engineering quality and release processes, and ship product improvements that directly impact users and the business
• The apps sit on top of a custom Go networking engine (Shadowsocks / WireGuard) delivered as a native library, plus OpenVPN via TunnelKit on iOS, and you will be the person who makes that engine feel fast, reliable, and effortless to users
• We are a user-facing product-led team, and we are looking for someone who is passionate about building private, secure products that people depend on every day
• You’ll work closely with the backend engineer, DevOps/network engineer, product managers, designers, marketing, operations, and several stakeholders to define and execute according to our strategic roadmap to accelerate our future growth
• You will help take over the existing mobile codebases from the acquired team, close knowledge gaps, understand undocumented dependencies, and progressively bring the apps into Mode's engineering standards and delivery practices
• What Success Looks Like:
• First 30–60 days:
• Understand the Android/iOS architecture and release processes
• Map the VPN integration and native networking libraries
• Identify critical technical and security risks
• Establish reliable local/build/release workflows
• Close knowledge gaps from the acquired team
• Contribute to 100% uptime
• Within 90–180 days:
• Stabilize the mobile apps
• Improve automated testing and CI/CD
• Complete the Android and iOS codebase modernization work
• Improve crash-free sessions and connection success
• Establish predictable app-store release processes
• Become the clear technical owner of the mobile domain
• Contribute to Uptime at world class market levels for similar products