Job Description
Lead Mobile Platform Engineer

Deliberate AI Hybrid (NYC or Boston) Full-Time

About the Role

Every signal our platform uses to detect changes in a patient's mental health - sleep disruption, activity shifts, circadian changes, heart rate variability - starts on a device in someone's pocket or on their wrist. You're the engineer who makes sure that data gets captured reliably, efficiently, and securely, from the native sensor layer all the way through to the backend services that feed our ML models and clinician dashboards.

You'll own the full mobile and infrastructure platform: native Android (Kotlin) and iOS (SwiftUI) sensing apps, the backend services that ingest and route sensor data, the container orchestration and deployment infrastructure, and the data pipeline layer that connects it all. Your first major project is modernizing a legacy sensing stack - replacing fragile infrastructure with production-hardened systems capable of supporting thousands of patients across global clinical trial sites. After that, you'll steward the platform's reliability and performance while contributing to new product capabilities as we scale.

Your collaborators aren't just other engineers - they're clinical researchers designing the studies that depend on your data quality, data engineers building feature pipelines from your sensor streams, and full-stack engineers building the web surfaces that display what your platform collects.

Who You Are

"Lead" at Deliberate means owning a technical domain, not necessarily managing a team - your primary impact is architectural and hands-on. You're the kind of engineer who reads the HIPAA spec for context, not just compliance. You thrive across infrastructure, backend, and mobile - and you prefer fixing foundations to adding features on shaky ground. You get satisfaction from replacing a fragile system with one that just works, and you understand that in clinical software, reliability isn't a nice-to-have - it's a patient safety issue. You want to own a platform end-to-end and build something you'd trust with your own care.

What You'll Do

• Own the native mobile sensing layer - Android (Kotlin) and iOS (SwiftUI) apps that collect passive behavioral and biometric data with excellent battery efficiency and privacy safeguards
• Modernize platform infrastructure: migrate to Kubernetes, implement infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi), harden security (TLS 1.3, secrets management, OIDC/OAuth2, HIPAA audit logging)
• Build and maintain the backend services that ingest, validate, and route sensor data from devices to ML pipelines and clinical interfaces
• Stand up production-grade observability (Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logging) and automated database backup with point-in-time recovery
• Consolidate and modernize data pipeline orchestration (Prefect or Dagster) for sensor data processing across clinical sites
• Build CI/CD pipelines, integration test suites, and E2E testing infrastructure across the platform

Growth trajectory: You're not inheriting someone else's architecture - you're (re)building it and then owning what you've built. As the company scales, this role grows into the senior platform leadership that defines how clinical data infrastructure works at Deliberate.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to work across infrastructure, backend, and mobile
• Are proficient in TypeScript/Node.js and Python, with working knowledge of at least one systems language (Rust, Go, or C++)
• Have experience with container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code
• Understand mobile development at the native layer - Kotlin/Android or Swift/iOS, not just cross-platform wrappers
• Have strong security instincts - TLS, secrets management, authentication protocols, and audit logging are things you care about, not boxes you check
• Have worked with cloud platforms (GCP or AWS) and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, or similar)
• Use agentic programming tools (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) as part of your workflow
• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

Strong candidates may also:

• Have built healthcare or clinical research systems with HIPAA compliance and PHI data handling
• Have experience with data pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster)
• Bring knowledge of digital phenotyping, passive sensing, or mHealth platforms
• Have experience with MongoDB or document databases at scale, including performance tuning
• Have a track record of modernizing legacy systems - migrating frameworks, upgrading dependencies, improving CI/CD, and paying down technical debt without breaking production

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $160,000 - $220,000 (commensurate with experience, qualifications, and location)
• Early-stage equity with meaningful ownership - you're joining at a stage where individual grants are substantial
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Flexible PTO policy
• Publication co-authorship on peer-reviewed clinical research - your engineering work shows up in the scientific record, not just the git log

Location: This is a hybrid role. We work in-person roughly 50% of the time in NYC or Boston - this is how we build culture and solve hard problems together as an early, fast-growing team. Candidates should be based in or willing to relocate to one of these cities.

Work authorization: Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. We welcome applicants who hold US citizenship, permanent residency, or existing work authorization including H-1B (transfer-eligible), OPT/STEM OPT, or TN visa (Canadian and Mexican citizens). If you already hold an H-1B, we will sponsor your green card if desired but we are not currently able to sponsor new H-1B petitions.