Staff Software Engineer - Mobile Team

Company Name: tastytrade  
Role: Staff Software Engineer – Mobile Team 
Location: Chicago, IL – Hybrid (3 days/week in office) 
 
As a Staff Engineer on our Mobile Team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the long-term technical direction of our iOS and Android retail trading platforms. You’ll act as both an architect and strategist—defining patterns, guiding cross-team initiatives, and ensuring our mobile applications remain scalable, reliable, and forward-looking. At the same time, you’ll stay close to the code, contributing directly to the most critical and high-impact areas where your expertise will set the standard for technical excellence.  

As a technical leader, you will influence not just what we build, but how we build it: aligning mobile priorities with business goals, driving architectural decisions, and helping engineers across levels deliver their best work. You’ll balance short-term product delivery with long-term platform health, ensuring our mobile experiences are world-class today and sustainable tomorrow.  

We have a native Android app for the phone form factor, and native iOS applications for both iPhone and iPad. Our codebase includes a transpiled Java library which handles interactions with the tastytrade API and provides common functionality across our customer-facing trading platforms.  

What You’ll Do 

• Hands-On Contribution: Remain an active developer and problem-solver, especially in critical or high-risk areas for both iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin, Java). 
• Cross-Functional Influence: Align mobile initiatives with backend, infrastructure, and platform teams to ensure cohesive technical strategies. 
• Architect & Design: Drive the technical design and architecture for large, cross-cutting features across iOS and Android, from business needs to delivery. Provide clear implementation plans that balance scalability, performance, and maintainability. 
• Design Native Replacements: Define and guide the implementation of new native modules that replace shared library functionality, ensuring performance, maintainability, and aligning them with platform best practices. 
• Scope & Estimate: Lead technical discovery and provide reliable effort estimates for large-scale features or initiatives, communicating trade-offs and risks effectively. 
• Raise the Bar: Ideate and recommend new paradigms, tools, or frameworks to improve developer experience, system performance, or process efficiency across mobile teams. 
• Influence Architecture: Drive consistency and shared patterns across platforms while respecting platform-specific paradigms. 
• Knowledge Sharing: Document and evangelize best practices learned through the migration to help future cross-platform initiatives. 
• Mentor & Coach: Provide technical guidance and career support to engineers at all levels, helping seniors sharpen their expertise and mid-levels grow into senior roles. 
• Partner with Stakeholders: Collaborate with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions with well-defined acceptance criteria. 

Who You Are: 

• Deep expertise in either iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin, Java) ecosystems, with a strong understanding of the other. This includes platform constraints and app architecture patterns. 
• A track record of designing and delivering complex, high-impact mobile features at scale. 
• Strong experience leading technical discovery, architectural decision-making, and roadmap planning. 
• A deep understanding of legacy system sunsetting and how to balance business delivery with long-term technical health. 
• Strong ability to create alignment across multiple platforms and teams, driving consensus on architectural decisions.