Senior Mobile Engineer

About the role

The HandsUp mobile app is the product. Everything else (the cloud vault, the lawyer network, the brand) is in service of an app that has to work in the moment a user reaches for it. That means a record button that fires in 200 milliseconds. Encryption that completes before the recording stops. Background uploads that survive lock screens, low signal, and battery saver mode.

You will be one of our first dedicated mobile hires, working closely with the co-founder of engineering and the design team. You will own significant portions of the app architecture, ship features end to end, and have a real voice in the technical direction we take. We currently target iOS and Android natively. We are open to revisiting that decision with the right person.

What you will do

• Build core features end to end across iOS (Swift, SwiftUI) and Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), with a strong cross-platform consistency story.
• Own real-time media capture pipelines including camera, microphone, GPS, and time-stamping with cryptographic signatures.
• Implement and maintain client-side AES-256 encryption with secure key management and zero-knowledge architecture. The user’s private key never leaves their device.
• Build resilient background upload and sync to our cloud vault, with retry, resume, and offline-first behavior.
• Architect the evidence library, search, and sharing flows with strong attention to performance on lower-end devices.
• Integrate the Apple Watch and CarPlay surfaces as we expand to those platforms.
• Set technical direction on mobile architecture, build tooling, performance budgets, and observability.
• Mentor mid-level mobile engineers and contribute to hiring as we grow the team.

What you bring

• 7 or more years of mobile engineering experience with at least four shipping production apps to the App Store and Play Store.
• Deep iOS expertise (Swift, SwiftUI, AVFoundation, Core Data or SwiftData) and strong Android expertise (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, CameraX, WorkManager). We need someone genuinely fluent in both platforms.
• Experience implementing cryptography in production, including AES-256, key derivation, secure enclaves, and end-to-end encryption patterns.
• Experience with real-time audio and video capture and the gnarliness that comes with it (frame dropping, codec selection, hardware acceleration).
• Strong opinions on background processing on iOS and Android. You know what BGProcessingTask, WorkManager, and notification-driven uploads can and cannot do.
• Excellent debugging instincts on production mobile bugs, including crash reports, ANRs, and battery drain reports.
• Comfort working closely with designers. You will spend real time on motion polish, not just feature wiring.
• Bias toward shipping in small, observable, reversible slices.

Bonus points

• Past experience at a security or privacy-first consumer company.
• Contributions to open-source mobile or cryptography libraries.
• Experience with Apple Watch, watchOS, CarPlay, or Android Auto.
• Experience with WebRTC, livestreaming, or other real-time media protocols.
• Familiarity with mobile app distribution outside major stores (TestFlight, internal track, MDM).

The team you would join

You will report to our co-founder of engineering and work in a small pod with a senior product designer and a product manager. The engineering team is intentionally small and senior. We avoid layers and we ship every week. You will have substantial influence over the technical direction of the company.

Compensation and benefits

The salary range for this role is $220,000 to $290,000 plus meaningful equity. Range is determined by experience, scope, and impact. We benchmark against top-quartile cash compensation at comparable venture-backed startups and re-benchmark every year.