Hands-on Senior Engineering Manager – Mobile

Senior Engineering Manager (Hands-On) – Mobile - London

Hybrid Working - 3 days onsite per week

Rate: £600 - £900 per day (inside of IR35)

Duration: 6-12 months

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager – Mobile to help build and deliver our next generation of travel experiences on iOS and Android.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role . Approximately 50% of your time will be spent actively designing and developing the mobile application , with the remaining time focused on people leadership and delivery management .

We are looking for someone who combines strong mobile engineering expertise with proven experience leading engineering teams and delivering complex products across multiple teams and stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

Hands-on Mobile Engineering — ~50%

• Actively design, develop, test and deliver production mobile application features.
• Be a hands-on engineer in Swift/iOS or Kotlin/Android .
• Contribute directly to technical solutions and mobile application architecture.
• Set and uphold high engineering standards for code quality, testing, performance, reliability and maintainability.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, design discussions and hands-on problem solving.
• Help the team make pragmatic technology and architecture decisions.
• Support reliable and frequent delivery of mobile releases to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store .

People Leadership & Delivery — ~50%

• Lead, coach and develop a team of engineers, creating a high-performing and collaborative engineering culture.
• Provide clear technical direction while enabling engineers to take ownership and grow.
• Own engineering delivery against product roadmaps, commitments and milestones.
• Identify risks, dependencies and blockers early and drive them to resolution.
• Coordinate delivery across engineering, product, design and other teams in a complex enterprise environment.
• Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior leadership.
• Build strong working relationships across teams and drive alignment when priorities or viewpoints differ.

What We’re Looking For

The following are essential requirements for this role :

• Hands-on mobile engineer: Deep, current development experience with iOS/Swift or Android/Kotlin . You must be comfortable spending significant time writing production code.
• Proven mobile delivery: Extensive experience building and launching multiple production mobile applications through the Apple App Store and/or Google Play Store.
• Technical leadership: Strong experience designing mobile solutions and contributing directly to application architecture and engineering decisions.
• People leadership: Significant experience leading and developing engineering teams, ideally 10–20+ engineers in complex technology organisations.
• Delivery leadership: A strong record of delivering complex technology initiatives, managing roadmaps, dependencies, risks and execution across multiple teams.
• Communication and collaboration: Exceptional ability to communicate clearly, influence decisions, resolve ambiguity and collaborate effectively across engineering, product, business and senior stakeholders.

Experience

• Significant professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in mobile application development.
• Strong commercial experience with Swift/iOS and/or Kotlin/Android .
• Demonstrated experience taking mobile products from development through production launch and ongoing operation.
• Experience leading engineering teams and developing engineers at different levels of seniority.
• Experience delivering large-scale products in complex organisations involving multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of modern mobile engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, observability, performance and production reliability.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

What Success Looks Like

You remain close to the code and architecture , while building a strong engineering team around you. You help the team ship high-quality mobile experiences predictably, remove obstacles to delivery, develop your engineers, and create alignment across the many teams required t…