[Hiring] Director of Mobile Engineering @Halo Collar

Role Description

Mobile is Halo's largest engineering team, full of strong individual talent, but without a leader who owns direction and decision-making. Today those decisions bottleneck through our CTO. This is a net-new, first-of-its-kind leadership role: you'll own mobile architecture end to end, lead the team's shift to AI-native development, and build the next layer of engineering leadership, all while we transition from a monolithic team into fast-moving, parallel pods running Shape Up.

What You'll Do

• Chair the Mobile Guild and set architectural direction across iOS and Android, reconciling firmware, backend, and mobile constraints before feature work begins.
• Define and drive our AI-native development practice — the standards, tooling, guardrails, and evaluation frameworks for agent-assisted, AI-driven engineering across the team, put into production and measured against real cycle-time and defect-rate gains.
• Own Release Readiness Reviews and sign off on what ships from mobile.
• Lead, coach, and career-path platform leads and developers across pods; own the mobile hiring bar.
• Represent mobile engineering at the Betting Table and in executive forums, translating engineering investment into business terms.
• Partner with the VP of Product on roadmap sequencing and design quality, and sync weekly with the CTO on architecture and investment priorities.

Qualifications

• AI-native engineering in practice, not experimentation: you've implemented AI-driven development yourself and led at least a few engineers onto that way of working — even if not yet at this scale.
• Hands-on iOS and Android depth (SwiftUI, TCA, Kotlin): enough to review pull requests and earn technical respect from senior engineers.
• Proven leadership of a small-to-mid mobile team (~10–15 engineers): still close to execution rather than several layers removed.
• Systems thinking across mobile, backend, and firmware: able to formalize on-device vs. service vs. firmware trade-offs, and comfortable where connectivity and data are unreliable.
• Proven success shipping design-forward consumer apps at scale (millions of users, high App Store ratings), and a track record of pushing engineers toward greater design quality.
• A track record of recruiting, mentoring, and retaining high-caliber engineers through periods of rapid change.
• Comfort leading a distributed, Europe-based team, including an early Eastern-time start for daily overlap.
• A history of driving change: building conviction in a team and holding the line under delivery pressure.
• If you haven't personally reviewed a pull request or been in production code within the last year, this isn't the right seat — we need someone still close to the work, not a manager of managers.

Nice to Have

• Background in consumer health/wearables, connected devices/IoT, mobility, automotive, or premium consumer product companies.
• Experience working with a contractor or engineering-partner staffing model.
• AI/ML built into the product itself, not just the development workflow.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision plans, plus company-paid Long-Term Disability.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Paid time off.
• Free Halo gear and product testing opportunities.
• Work remotely from anywhere in the U.S.
• Be part of a mission-driven, dog-loving team.
• We provide competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base salary, incentives, and benefits. The base salary for this role is $200,000 - 220,000. Final compensation depends on experience, skills, and qualifications.