Mobile Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager, Mobile Engineering

PetSafe Brands, formerly known as Radio Systems Corporation, is headquartered in Knoxville, TN. It has been named "The Marble City" and "Scruffy City", names we have embraced for our unique charm. We are the home of 1982 World's Fair and we boast of 21 craft breweries around the city. If you like to hike or camp, visit the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Take your pick of outdoor activities from walking, tubing, running, or biking in our Urban Wilderness. Knox County has an amazing public-school system, no state income tax, low property taxes and cost of living. We host Music and Shakespeare on the Square as well as Family Movie Nights on the Square during the summer months in downtown Knoxville.

Our Company: PetSafe Brands is the world leader in pet products through our family of brands: Pet Safe Brand, Sport DOG Brand, Invisible Fence Brand, Kurgo and Premier Pet. Pet Safe Brand makes every product from leashes and harnesses to water fountains and and litter boxes. We have an ambitious goal of touching over 21 million pets, people, and communities around the world each year. We serve a broad range of pet owners from providing the hunter the best gear for a successful hunt to accommodating the "Not-So-Crazy Cat Lady" with all the entertaining toys and effective solutions she could ever imagine. We do this by creating a culture of enthusiasm, resilience, adaptability, and teamwork every day in the office. We work hard to be our community's employer of choice as we all live our purpose: We exist to unleash freedom for pet parents by keeping their pets happy, healthy and safe.

Summary of Position:

The Engineering Manager, Mobile Engineering will lead the design, development, testing, and delivery of PetSafe's mobile applications. This role is responsible for building a high-performing team and delivering high-quality customer experiences through modern mobile engineering practices, strong architectural standards, and disciplined quality execution.

This leader will bring deep expertise in native and cross-platform mobile technologies (Flutter, React Native), modern mobile architecture patterns (reactive programming, declarative UI, state management), and a strong engineering culture rooted in unit testing, automated test coverage, CI/CD, analytics, and operational excellence. This role will also drive the thoughtful adoption of AI-assisted workflows to improve developer productivity, reduce cycle time, and increase quality.

The organization leverages a distributed hybrid delivery model; the Engineering Manager will help balance internal development capacity with external partners (staff augmentation and project-based delivery) while maintaining clear engineering ownership, code quality, and knowledge retention.

Responsibilities:

Mobile Engineering Delivery & Technical Leadership

• Lead the end-of-the-end delivery of mobile features and releases, ensuring high quality, performance, reliability, and strong customer experience.
• Own mobile engineering standards across architecture, code quality, security, and maintainability; establish best practices for cross-platform development (Flutter/React Native).
• Partner with backend/cloud, firmware/IoT, web/e-commerce, product management, design, and QA to deliver cohesive customer journeys across devices, app, and services.
• Drive strong operational rigor: release management, monitoring, crash/performance analytics, incident response, and continuous improvement.

Quality Engineering Mindset (Unit Testing & Automation First)

• Set expectations and accountability for unit testing and automated test coverage as core engineering deliverablesnot optional.
• Implement and evolve a test strategy for mobile (unit, integration, UI automation), aligned to TDD/BDD practices and measurable coverage goals.
• Improve defect prevention through shift-left practices: clear acceptance criteria, early validation, code review discipline, and automation at the right layers.
• Collaborate closely with QA/Quality Engineering to ensure consistent release readiness criteria and automated regression confidence.

CI/CD, Tooling, and Analytics

• Build and maintain robust mobile CI/CD pipelines to improve build reliability, release velocity, and developer experience.
• Establish standards for instrumentation and analytics (funnel, engagement, feature adoption, performance, and stability) to enable data-driven decisions.
• Ensure secure development practices including dependency management, scanning, and aligned release controls.

Payments, Security, and Compliance

• Lead implementation and ongoing stewardship of mobile payment experiences, with strong understanding of payments integration and PCI considerations (in partnership with security/compliance functions as needed).
• Ensure mobile engineering meets security, privacy, and compliance expectations appropriate for consumer applications and connected ecosystems.

AI-Enabled Engineering (Multiplier)

• Identify and implement AI-assisted workflows that measurably improve productivity and quality (e.g., test generation, code review support, defect triage, release notes, analytics insights, automation acceleration).
• Establish team norms and guardrails for safe, secure, and maintainable use of AI tools in development.

People Leadership, Hiring, and Team Development

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers; build a strong culture of accountability, ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Create clear expectations, career paths, and development plans for team members; provide regular feedback and performance management.
• Build a high-performing environment with strong onboarding, mentorship, and technical leadership at multiple levels (senior engineers, tech leads).

Internal / External Capacity & Partner Leadership

• Contribute to planning and delivery using a hybrid capacity modelbalancing internal development capacity with external partner capacity (staff augmentation and project-based delivery).
• Establish clear engagement models with external partners, including onboarding, delivery expectations, engineering standards, documentation, and knowledge transfer.
• Drive partner performance through outcomes, delivery transparency, and quality gates; ensure external contributions meet security, reliability, and maintainability expectations.
• Maintain strong internal ownership of architecture, technical direction, and long-term product health while scaling throughput with external teams.

What Success Looks Like:

• Experience building mobile apps in the IoT / connected product space (device onboarding, provisioning, connectivity troubleshooting, telemetry-driven experiences).
• Experience working with nearshore/offshore partners in staff augmentation and/or project-based delivery models.
• Familiarity with BLE/Wi-Fi flows, device lifecycle patterns, and connected ecosystem constraints.
• Experience working in a multi-team environment with shared platforms/services and cross-functional delivery (product, design, QA, firmware, cloud).

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in people leadership (or equivalent leadership experience with demonstrated team ownership).
• Strong hands-on background delivering consumer-facing mobile applications at scale, including performance, stability, and user experience considerations.
• Experience with cross-platform mobile frameworks such as Flutter and/or React Native (deep expertise in at least one; familiarity with native iOS/Android preferred).
• Strong command of modern mobile architecture concepts: reactive programming, declarative UI, state management, modular design, and testable architecture.
• Demonstrated use of TDD and/or BDD, with a track record of improving unit test discipline and automated test coverage.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines for mobile delivery (build automation, signing, distribution, release orchestration).
• Experience using mobile analytics and observability tooling (crash reporting, performance monitoring, event instrumentation) to drive product and quality improvements.
• Experience delivering payments features and working within PCI-related constraints (in collaboration with security/compliance partners).
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field required; equivalent experience considered.