Mobile Principle Software Engineer

Dscout is hiring a Mobile Principal Software Engineer to lead its mobile team and evolve its participant experience for an AI-first UX research platform. The role focuses on mobile architecture and development processes, participant platform direction, cross-functional product work, engineering mentorship, and operational improvements.

Responsibilities:

• Lead our mobile team and its continued maturity and evolution in this AI-native space
• Stand up an AI-native development process for the mobile team — agents, evals, review loops — that sustains that pace beyond the rewrite
• Drive a thin-client architecture for the participant experience, pushing business logic to the backend so the apps stay simple
• Contribute Python to our AI backend service when mobile needs new capabilities — using AI agents to do it efficiently
• Set our participant API and broader participant platform direction beyond the mobile team
• Spend about 70% of your time supporting your product team; the other 30% on self-directed leadership tasks and platform improvements
• Drive continuous process improvement across the mobile team and its partner teams
• Mentor other engineers and help evolve the Engineering org
• Apply a DevOps mindset to improve the Continuous Delivery pipeline and other operational aspects of our SaaS & mobile platform
• Be involved in security and compliance efforts for the organization (we are SOC II & HITRUST certified)

Requirements:

• A Mobile Principal Software Engineer who will lead our mobile team and evolve it to meet the shifting demand of a full AI-first platform — on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters
• You're deeply hands-on with AI coding agents, and you've used them to ship serious work, not just autocomplete
• You're as comfortable architecting a thin mobile client backed by a powerful API as you are dropping into our Python backend (with AI assist) to add what mobile needs
• You're deeply product focused, energized by solving business problems, not just writing code
• You ask "why" before "how," and you partner with Product and Design as a peer — shaping problems, not just taking specs
• You know when to ship a scrappy prototype to test an assumption versus when to invest in a foundation built to last, and you can explain that call to a PM or designer
• You can hold multiple projects in your head at once, spotting where they'll collide, depend on each other, or share a chance for reuse
• You bring Principal/Staff-level scope as a product engineer — 10+ years of experience evolving apps and standing up new ones across product and technical dimensions
• You have a proven track record of leading technical improvements and mentoring other developers, as collaboration and empathy are cornerstones of our culture
• You thrive setting your own direction with minimal input while staying aligned to company goals
• Significant experience as a mobile software engineer with Principal/Staff-level scope (titles aren't important — we care about what you've shipped and led)
• Experience with iOS and Android, and a willingness to work outside the mobile ecosystem when the problem calls for it
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) — not just autocomplete — and an opinion on how to design an SDLC around them
• Experience in system architecture to supplement mobile experience (backend API design, databases, mobile devops), how it all fits together, and design trade-offs
• A proven track record of leading, mentoring, and growing engineers
• Expertise with cloud-based SaaS architectures and evolutionary design
• At home with agile, DevOps, CI/CD, observability/tracing, and data/metrics-based decision making