Principal Mobile SDK Engineer (Navigation)

About the role

Flatgigs is looking for a highly experienced Principal Mobile SDK Engineer to lead the architecture and development of its proprietary Navigation SDK. Unlike typical app development, this role builds the core engine behind navigation experiences: wrapping and extending open-source native mapping engines, integrating custom routing APIs, and exposing a clean, robust, developer-friendly API for Android and iOS. The engineer works directly with the founders to turn navigation logic into a reusable, high-performance SDK.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement a unified navigation SDK architecture for Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) that wraps native mapping libraries.
• Implement turn-by-turn navigation logic, including route snapping, off-route detection, rerouting and ETA calculation.
• Design intuitive, idiomatic and thread-safe APIs, prioritizing developer experience.
• Optimize for battery usage, memory management (tile caching) and CPU efficiency during active navigation.
• Use raw GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope data to improve location accuracy and handle tunnel or weak-signal scenarios.
• Manage the CI/CD pipeline for SDK distribution (Maven Central, CocoaPods, Swift Package Manager) and versioning.

Required profile

• 10+ years of engineering experience and deep knowledge of mobile development lifecycles.
• Proven experience building and maintaining SDKs or shared libraries used by third-party apps, with attention to semantic versioning, backward compatibility and ABI stability.
• Experience designing clean interfaces using patterns such as Facade, Delegate and Observer.
• Deep understanding of Android Foreground Services and iOS Background Modes (Location Updates, Audio).

Required skills

• Dual native proficiency: Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS)
• Preferred: GIS and mapping internals, vector tiles (OpenGL/Metal), GeoJSON, Mercator vs WGS84, computational geometry (bearings, distances, line snapping)
• Preferred: Kotlin Multiplatform, ProGuard/R8 rules and module interfaces