Manager, Mobile Software Engineering

The role

You will lead a collaborative team of mobile software engineers building and delivering features for NPR's flagship mobile applications. You will partner with Product, Design, Data, and Editorial teams while overseeing external vendor relationships and agency partnerships.

What you will do

• Manage, mentor, and coach a team of Mobile Software Engineers
• Lead recruitment and hiring efforts and manage onboarding
• Oversee external software vendors, development agencies, and staff augmentation contractors
• Partner with product managers, UX designers, data analysts, and editorial partners
• Lead technical planning, scoping, and execution of software projects using Agile
• Conduct software design and code reviews
• Implement engineering workflow improvements
• Write helper tools or automation scripts to optimize developer experience
• Coordinate response to critical mobile production bugs or infrastructure incidents
• Coordinate workflows and deliverables for external contributors

Required qualifications

• At least 3+ years of experience directly managing mobile software engineers within an agile organization
• 2+ years of experience overseeing external engineering vendors, contractors, or development agencies
• Prior experience as an individual contributor in engineering, testing, and shipping robust code for at least one large-scale mobile application
• Hands-on proficiency in Swift/Objective-C (iOS) or Kotlin/Java (Android)
• Strong working knowledge of native mobile release infrastructures
• Hands-on experience working with modern version control systems (primarily Git)
• Demonstrated experience collaborating within cross-functional Agile/Scrum product teams
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated competency in fostering an equitable, supportive, and inclusive team culture
• Strong analytical skill set with an automation-first mindset
• Focus on quality and empathy for end-users
• Deep fluency in Agile methodologies and software project delivery management

Nice to have

• Professional experience managing both internal employees and external agency vendors/contractors
• Experience with native mobile media streaming frameworks (such as AVKit/AVFoundation for iOS, or Media3/ExoPlayer for Android)
• Familiarity with modern responsive design architectures (SwiftUI/Combine or Jetpack Compose/Coroutines), design patterns (MVVM), and automotive platforms (CarPlay/Android Auto)

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• Life/ accidental death and dismemberment
• Long-term disability
• Short-term disability
• Voluntary retirement savings
• Paid time off
• Access to health and wellness

About the company

NPR is a mission-driven multimedia organization that produces news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations.