About the RoleWe are seeking a Director of Software Engineering, Mobile Applications to lead the engineering teams responsible for our consumer-facing mobile experiences across iOS and Android.
This leader will own the end-to-end delivery, quality, performance, and evolution of our mobile applications. You will partner closely with Product, Design, Data, AI, and Platform leaders to create intuitive, reliable, and personalized experiences that help consumers navigate one of the most important decisions of their lives.
This is a product-oriented engineering leadership role. The ideal candidate combines strong mobile technical judgment with a deep understanding of consumer behavior, business outcomes, and organizational leadership. You will build and develop high-performing teams, establish a unified mobile application strategy, and ensure that our iOS and Android experiences operate as one coherent product ecosystem.
What You'll DoLead the Mobile Application Organization- Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for customer-facing functionality across the company's iOS and Android applications.
- Manage and develop engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and mobile engineers.
- Establish clear ownership, operating rhythms, engineering standards, and accountability across mobile application teams.
- Own the engineering delivery of key mobile customer journeys, including search, discovery, property experiences, saved homes, personalization, account experiences, notifications, and emerging AI-enabled capabilities.
- Work closely with Product and Design to translate business strategy and customer needs into an executable mobile roadmap.
- Ensure strong alignment across iOS and Android while preserving the platform-specific experiences and conventions that customers expect.
- Improve planning, estimation, dependency management, and delivery predictability across multiple teams.
- Establish clear success measures tied to customer engagement, retention, conversion, lead generation, and overall product quality.
Shape the Mobile Technology Strategy- Define and evolve the architecture of large-scale consumer mobile applications.
- Drive modular, maintainable, and scalable application designs that support rapid product development.
- Partner with iOS, Android, Web, API, Identity, Data, and AI platform teams to establish clear interfaces and shared technical standards.
- Advance capabilities such as feature flags, remote configuration, experimentation, server-driven experiences, and selective web-based delivery where they improve speed and operational flexibility.
- Increase the amount of functionality that can be safely introduced, adjusted, or rolled back without requiring an immediate app-store release, while maintaining a high-quality native customer experience.
- Guide the responsible use of native, cross-platform, server-driven, and web technologies based on customer experience, security, performance, and business needs.
- Reduce technical debt while balancing near-term product commitments with long-term platform health.
Improve Quality, Reliability, and Release Excellence- Own mobile application quality, stability, performance, accessibility, and operational readiness.
- Establish measurable standards for crash-free sessions, startup time, responsiveness, app size, battery utilization, network performance, and customer-reported issues.
- Strengthen automated testing, continuous integration, deployment automation, staged rollout, monitoring, and rollback capabilities.
- Improve the speed and reliability of iOS and Android releases while meeting app-store policies and security requirements.
- Ensure teams use telemetry, customer insights, experiments, and production data to guide decisions.
- Build strong incident-management and continuous-improvement practices across the mobile organization.
Lead Through Partnership- Build trusted partnerships with Product, Design, Analytics, Marketing, Security, Infrastructure, and Customer Support.
- Collaborate with mobile platform leaders who own shared iOS and Android foundations, developer tooling, architecture, and reusable capabilities.
- Align application and platform investments to avoid duplication and accelerate delivery across teams.
- Communicate strategy, priorities, risks, progress, and tradeoffs clearly to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Represent mobile engineering in planning, architecture, investment, and product strategy discussions.
What You'll Bring- Significant (10+ years) software engineering experience, including substantial leadership responsibility for large-scale consumer mobile applications.
- 5-7 years experience leading engineering managers and multiple teams across iOS and Android.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
- Strong technical knowledge of modern native mobile architecture, development practices, application lifecycle management, and app-store delivery.
- Experience operating mobile applications with significant traffic, frequent releases, and high expectations for performance and reliability.
- Demonstrated success building customer-facing products in a marketplace, e-commerce, travel, financial services, media, or similarly complex consumer environment.
- Experience with modular application architecture, APIs, experimentation, feature management, observability, automated testing, and CI/CD.
- Understanding of server-driven experiences, remote configuration, webviews, and approaches that allow selected functionality to evolve independently of native application releases.
- Ability to determine where native experiences are essential and where alternative delivery models can responsibly improve speed and flexibility.
- Strong product judgment and the ability to connect engineering decisions with customer and business outcomes.
- Proven ability to recruit, coach, and retain high-performing engineering leaders and teams.
- Strong communication skills and experience influencing senior technical, product, and business stakeholders.
- A track record of operating effectively through ambiguity, organizational change, and competing priorities.
How Success Will Be MeasuredDuring the first year, this leader will be expected to:
- Establish one cohesive engineering strategy across the iOS and Android applications.
- Improve mobile delivery predictability and cross-functional alignment.
- Increase application stability, performance, release confidence, and customer satisfaction.
- Clarify ownership between mobile application teams and mobile platform teams.
- Expand safe experimentation, staged rollout, remote configuration, and rollback capabilities.
- Develop a strong organization of engineering managers, technical leaders, and mobile engineers.
- Deliver measurable improvements in customer engagement, conversion, retention, and application quality.
Leadership AttributesThe successful candidate will be:
- Customer-focused: Makes decisions based on customer needs and measurable outcomes.
- Technically credible: Can guide architecture and engineering strategy without becoming the bottleneck.
- Product-minded: Understands that engineering success includes business and customer impact, not only technical delivery.
- Decisive and pragmatic: Balances speed, quality, risk, and long-term maintainability.
- Collaborative: Builds strong partnerships and creates shared accountability across organizations.
- Talent-oriented: Develops leaders, raises standards, and builds durable teams.
- Accountable: Communicates directly, surfaces risks early, and follows through on commitments.
How We Work:We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together.
How We Reward You:Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:
- Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
- Family forming benefits
- 13 Paid Holidays
- Flexible Time Off
- 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off
- Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
- Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
- 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
- Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
- Free snacks and refreshments in each office location
