Lead Software Engineer - Mobile

Job Description Overview of the role: As a Lead iOS Engineer at Freshworks, you own the technical direction of one or more flagship mobile applications serving millions of users. You set the architectural standard, make the build-vs-buy and native-vs-cross-platform calls, and are accountable for the quality, performance, and release health of your surface area. You lead a team of iOS and cross-platform engineers — through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on pairing rather than through hierarchy — and you partner directly with Product, Design, Backend, and QA leadership to shape the roadmap, not just execute it. You remain a hands-on engineer: you write code in the hardest parts of the system, and your judgement is the escalation point when the team is stuck. Responsibilities: Technical leadership & architecture - Own and evolve the mobile architecture across the app portfolio — modularization, dependency boundaries, state management, navigation, and offline/sync strategy. - Make and document consequential technical decisions (native Swift vs Flutter/React Native, third-party SDK adoption, persistence and caching strategy) with clear trade-off analysis and a migration path. - Author and drive technical design documents; run design reviews and hold the bar on SOLID, clean architecture, and pattern consistency (MVVM, VIPER, Coordinator, unidirectional data flow). - Lead large-scale refactors and platform migrations (e.g. UIKit → SwiftUI, monolith → modular packages) with incremental, low-risk rollout plans. - Identify and remove systemic technical debt; maintain a prioritized architecture backlog reviewed with Product and Engineering Management. Delivery & execution - Break down ambiguous, multi-quarter product initiatives into scoped, sequenced, estimable work for the team. - Stay hands-on: personally deliver the highest-risk components, prototypes, and performance-critical paths. - Own the release train — versioning, release branching, phased rollouts, App Store submission and review escalations, kill switches, and rollback procedures. - Own build and developer productivity: build times, flaky test elimination, local dev setup, and CI/CD reliability (Fastlane, GitHub Actions). - Drive integration contracts with backend teams for RESTful and GraphQL APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and error-handling standards. Quality, performance & reliability - Define and enforce the quality bar: test strategy across unit, integration, snapshot, and UI layers; code coverage expectations; and mandatory quality gates in CI. - Own crash-free-session rate, ANR/hang rate, cold-start and frame-rate budgets, app size, and battery/network efficiency for your surface area; set targets and report against them. - Instrument and profile with Instruments, MetricKit, and Xcode Organizer; lead performance investigations that cross app, SDK, and backend boundaries. - Act as incident commander for production mobile incidents — triage, mitigate, communicate, and run blameless post-mortems with tracked action items. - Define observability standards: crash reporting, structured logging, analytics events, feature flags, and remote config (Crashlytics/Sentry, Firebase Remote Config). People & influence - Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers; grow at least one engineer to the next level through structured feedback and stretch ownership. - Own code review culture — set expectations for review depth and turnaround, and coach through reviews rather than gatekeeping. - Drive the hiring bar for mobile: design and calibrate interview loops, conduct architecture and coding interviews, and support onboarding. - Provide input to Engineering Managers on performance, growth, and team composition. - Represent mobile engineering in cross-functional and cross-org forums; influence platform, design-system, and API decisions made outside your team. - Write and evangelize internal standards, playbooks, and documentation; run knowledge-sharing sessions and guild forums. Product & business partnership - Partner with Product to shape scope and sequencing — surface technical constraints early and propose cheaper paths to the same outcome. - Define success metrics with Product (adoption, engagement, crash rate, task completion) and drive iteration based on data. - Assess feasibility and effort for new initiatives; provide credible estimates with explicit assumptions and risks. - Implement and support compliance of self and team to Freshworks compliance and information security processes, including secure-coding practices, data-handling requirements, and privacy/App Store policy obligations.