Staff Mobile Engineer

The Staff Mobile Engineer is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the mobile experience that has become the primary daily touchpoint for our customers. This role involves architecting and leading the development of our React Native application across iOS and Android, driving the technical strategy for mobile, and contributing to the organization's long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, designers, and stakeholders to ship a premium, native-feeling experience for our full e-commerce, appointment, and membership business — while mentoring engineers at all levels and fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

This is also an AI-forward role. We expect our Staff Mobile Engineer to both build AI-powered experiences into the app and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools — while retaining the deep technical skepticism required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships.

The base range for this contract position is between $185k-$190k with expectation of 40 hours a week. At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States.

What You'll Do

• Own the mobile platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship our React Native application across iOS and Android, making foundational technical decisions that shape how we deliver the mobile experience to our guests.
• Drive mobile technical strategy. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns.
• Build AI-powered mobile experiences. Bring AI capabilities directly into the hands of customers — surfacing personalized recommendations, powering conversational and agent-driven interactions, and integrating LLM-backed features into native mobile interfaces.
• Leverage the Expo ecosystem as a product advantage. Own EAS build pipelines, configure custom native modules via config plugins without ejecting, and ship over-the-air updates to iterate rapidly. We already maintain native modules for Live Activities, biometric authentication, beacons, AR virtual try-on, and payments — you'll extend and harden these.
• Champion mobile UX and performance. Obsess over the details that make an app feel premium and native: frame rates, navigation transitions, list rendering, keyboard handling, and the accessibility standards required to support a diverse customer base.
• Own reliability in the wild. Treat CI/CD, crash monitoring, analytics, and App Store / Play Store release management as a fundamental part of the job — not an afterthought. Set a high bar through monitoring, error tracking, and optimization.
• Take ownership of large, ambiguous initiatives and break them into actionable workstreams. Lead efforts to refactor and optimize large areas of the codebase, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability.
• Mentor and raise the bar. Establish patterns for code reuse, elevate the engineers around you through rigorous code review and testing practices, and foster a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product and leadership to align technical solutions with business priorities, shaping both what gets built and how it gets built.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep, specialized focus on React Native and Expo.
• A proven track record of building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy mobile applications in production at scale.
• Expo and mobile infrastructure expertise. You know how to manage EAS builds, integrate complex native modules without ejecting, ship OTA updates, and navigate the strict review guidelines of the App Store and Google Play.
• Mastery of mobile state and performance. You understand the React render cycle on mobile, know how to prevent UI-thread blocking, optimize list rendering, and orchestrate complex asynchronous data fetching. Strong command of TypeScript, navigation patterns, and platform-specific considerations.
• Full lifecycle ownership. You build things that run reliably in production, not just pass review — owning the CI/CD pipeline, crash rates, and your app's behavior in the real world.
• Your workflow has been altered by AI. You are already using frontier agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) to build faster, and can describe specific ways they have structurally changed how you work — while retaining the skepticism to audit, verify, and fully own their output.
• Demonstrated technical leadership. A track record of setting technical direction, designing scalable and maintainable architecture, and measurably leveling up the engineers around you.
• A high-ownership mindset with a bias toward action, comfort operating in ambiguity, and strong product intuition.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with low ego and high standards.

Bonus Points

• Experience integrating LLMs, AI agents, or ML-powered features into a production mobile app.
• Native iOS (Swift/Objective-C) or Android (Kotlin/Java) experience for when we need to drop into native code — we maintain custom modules including Live Activities and biometric auth.
• Background in e-commerce, subscriptions/memberships, payments, or appointment/booking systems.
• Experience with AR / virtual try-on, location services, or push/lifecycle messaging.
• Open-source contributions, or apps you've built and shipped to the world yourself.

Big on Benefits

The Perks? Glad you asked…

• Comprehensive Healthcare
• 100% Company Paid Short and Long Term Disability
• 401k Participation and Equity Grants
• Continuing Education Contributions
• HSA Employer Contributions and FSA Options
• Parental Leave Program
• Commuter Benefits
• Responsible Paid Time Off Program
• Complimentary Madison Reed Products + Discounts on Hair Color Bar Services
• Company sponsored events
• But wait, there’s more…

We are Madison Reed.

We’re disrupting a $50 billion industry.

Since 2013, we’ve offered our clients the option to truly own their beauty with a revolutionary choice—your place or ours? Home or Hair Color Bar? Our professional hair color is truly omnichannel, with the option to order or subscribe through our website, pick up in-store at our Hair Color Bars, or make an appointment at one of our Hair Color Bar locations (over 20 & growing). At our Hair Color Bars, clients can choose from a variety of color services from licensed cosmetologists—permanent hair color, roots only, hair gloss, highlights and more. With our men’s line launched in 2020, we’re shaking up the $50 billion hair care industry with products that continue to raise the bar for doing hair at home.

We live our values.

Here at our San Francisco headquarters and in every Hair Color Bar, we truly live our values—Love, Joy, Courage, Responsibility, and Trust. Our values inform everything we do, from how we treat our clients to how we treat every member of our fast-growing team. Our founder & CEO, Amy Errett, has fostered a one-of-a-kind culture based on transparency, accountability, and fun; where diversity and inclusion are of utmost importance and every team member feels supported to succeed.

We are hair color that breaks the rules.

Our commitment to the ultimate client experience, paired with our dedication to product innovation and the latest beauty technology, has attracted a devoted, consistently-growing base of fans, converts, and color evangelists. We love what we do—and it shows.

Join us in our mission to live life colorfully and make personal care more personal.

Information for Recruiters: Madison Reed only accepts resumes directly from candidates. Madison Reed does not accept unsolicited resumes from staffing vendors, including recruitment agencies and/or search firms, and does not pay fees to any such vendors for any unsolicited resumes.

Madison Reed. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to recruiting, training, compensating and promoting our employees regardless of race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender or any other protected classes as required by applicable law that might make us unique or different. As a company, we are dedicated to reflecting the diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion found in the communities we serve. Inclusion is at the heart of what we do, from the way we craft our job descriptions, to the values we espouse daily.