Principal Mobile Engineer (iOS)

Overview

As a Principal Mobile Engineer (iOS) in Air Shopping Experience, you will provide influential technical leadership for the native air shopping stack. You will shape mobile strategy and outcomes, translate ambiguous business problems into technical direction, and support day-to-day engineering when needed.

What you'll do

• Provide technical leadership and architecture direction for iOS in Air Shopping, including air search, filters/sorting, details, ancillaries, and checkout entry across apps and brands.
• Turn high-level or ambiguous business requirements into end-to-end technical solutions, technical requirements, milestones, and workstreams for multiple teams.
• Design and improve complex systems, contracts, and integrations across native apps, platform services, experimentation, identity, and checkout.
• Propose solutions that work across domains, brands, and platforms.
• Champion mobile practices in UI/UX, performance, accessibility, offline behavior, error handling, operational excellence, and backwards compatibility.
• Establish and enforce standards for code quality, testing, observability, analytics, alerts, on-call, and incident response.
• Define and socialize mobile analytics and performance metrics, including crash-free rate, start time, interaction latency, and funnel metrics.
• Ensure features are observable, safe to experiment on, and easy to roll out and roll back with experimentation and platform teams.
• Own end-to-end delivery for large, multi-squad initiatives across iOS, Android, web, backend, experimentation, product, and design.
• Improve the technology stack, reduce duplication and technical debt, and simplify architecture where possible.
• Develop and communicate a technical vision for Air Shopping on iOS tied to traveler outcomes, business metrics, and platform strategy.
• Translate business needs into engineering priorities, trade-offs, and roadmaps, and step in for a peer engineering director when needed.
• Contribute to and help lead mobile and architecture communities of practice.
• Sponsor and drive high-impact, cross-organizational initiatives related to native apps.
• Coach senior individual contributors in leadership and technical skills, mentor engineers, and provide feedback to support career growth.
• Interface with senior and executive leadership and influence cross-functional partners.

What you'll need

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience.
• 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience, with a specific focus on building and shipping complex, large-scale consumer mobile applications.
• Expert-level proficiency in native iOS development using Swift, including extensive experience with UIKit and/or SwiftUI.
• Deep technical knowledge of iOS internals, including concurrency, networking, memory management, and performance tuning.
• Proven experience leading the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), including design, code review, source control, CI/CD, testing (unit/UI/integration), and deployment.
• Demonstrated experience navigating App Store policies, privacy regulations, and accessibility standards.
• Experience architecting scalable mobile solutions and defining coding standards and design practices for engineering teams.
• Experience mentoring and providing feedback to other engineers to facilitate career growth.
• Proven ability to contribute to the full stack (client and service/backend) during critical production incidents or architectural migrations.
• Advanced expertise in observability, experimentation platforms (A/B testing), and client-server design patterns.
• Experience interacting with and influencing cross-functional leadership (Product, Design, Data) to align technical stacks with business outcomes.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Proven ability to contribute to the full stack (client and service/backend) during critical production incidents or architectural migrations.
• Demonstrated success in “multi-brand” or “multi-app” architecture, designing systems and APIs that support multiple evolving business needs simultaneously.
• Advanced expertise in observability, experimentation platforms (A/B testing), and client-server design patterns.
• Strong strategic mindset with a track record of evaluating and driving new technology choices based on business impact, cost, and risk (vs. hype).
• Experience interacting with and influencing cross-functional leadership (Product, Design, Data) to align technical stacks with business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring high-level individual contributors (Senior and Principal engineers) and influencing organizational promotion/performance processes.
• A history of defining organizational strategy regarding where to standardize tooling versus where to allow differentiation across teams.

Details

• Based in Gurgaon.
• Collaborate with distributed teams across Expedia Group.