Mobile Engineering Manager - Apps

Our team of 450 colleagues across Technology, Product and Data is at the heart of The Economist Group’s digital-first agenda. Together, we design, build and optimise the digital products, platforms and data capabilities that power our business and reach millions of people around the world. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, data scientist or analyst, you'll work on products that have real-world impact. From enhancing economist.com and developing new products for Economist Intelligence to creating personalised experiences and applying AI to solve complex challenges, you'll help shape how consumers, businesses and government leaders access trusted insights. Working in cross-functional teams, we combine engineering excellence, product thinking and data expertise to solve meaningful problems, experiment with new technologies and continuously improve the experiences we create. It's an opportunity to do challenging, purposeful work alongside curious, collaborative colleagues, while helping drive sustainable growth for one of the world's most trusted brands.

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The role

We are looking for a Mobile Engineering Manager to lead our iOS and Android engineering team and help shape the future of our mobile platform. This is a player-coach role: you'll own the health, delivery and growth of the mobile engineering function, staying close to the code while also leading people, and partnering closely with product to shape what we build and why. As Mobile Engineering Manager, you will work closely with engineers, product managers, designers and other engineering leads to ship a fast, reliable and well-crafted mobile experience.

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Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of iOS and Android engineers, providing day-to-day management, mentorship and career development.
• Stay hands-on: review code, contribute to architectural decisions, and step into implementation when it matters.
• Own delivery for the mobile team: planning, prioritisation, and removing blockers in partnership with product management.
• Set and uphold engineering standards for code quality, testing, performance, accessibility and release practices across both platforms.
• Partner with Product, Design, QA and backend/platform teams to turn roadmap priorities into a well-sequenced, technically sound mobile plan.
• Get hands-on with product and business requirements: ask questions, spot gaps, and help refine specs before and during build, rather than treating them as fixed inputs from the product.
• Use business and product metrics (engagement, retention, subscriber conversion, crash-free rate, and similar) to inform prioritisation, trade-off decisions, and what "done" looks like for a feature.
• Drive improvements to the team's engineering practices: CI/CD, release cadence, crash/performance monitoring, and app store operations.
• Recruit, interview and onboard new mobile engineers as the team grows.
• Represent mobile engineering in broader engineering leadership discussions, including technical strategy and cross-team dependencies.

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Who you are

• Proven experience as an engineering manager or tech lead with direct people-management responsibility for mobile engineers.
• Strong hands-on background in native mobile development (iOS/Swift and/or Android/Kotlin), comfortable reviewing code and discussing architecture in both ecosystems.
• Track record of shipping and operating consumer-facing mobile apps at scale, including release management and app store submission processes.
• Experience balancing hands-on technical contribution with people leadership and delivery ownership.
• Strong understanding of mobile engineering fundamentals: performance, offline/networking, accessibility, testing (unit/UI), and CI/CD for mobile.
• Excellent communication skills, able to work closely with product, design and other engineering functions, and to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong product sense: comfortable interrogating and refining product/business requirements rather than just implementing them as given, and able to spot when a requirement doesn't hold up.

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