Manager, Software Development - iOS Mobile App

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We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.

About Our Team

The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning News and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.

Why This Role Matters

The Washington Post is seeking a Manager, Software Development to lead the engineering team responsible for our iOS app, the foundation for personalization, ads, sections, articles, App Store subscription management, analytics, audio, video and more, and one of The Post’s most important channels for reader engagement. This role provides dedicated people and delivery leadership for the team while partnering closely with Android, Staff Engineering, Product, and shared engineering teams to deliver high-quality mobile experiences quickly and predictably.

This is a hands-on engineering management role. The Manager, Software Development will set priorities and assignments, develop engineers, remove blockers, identify delivery risks early, and establish clear accountability for delivering approved work to readers, while remaining close enough to the technology to guide difficult engineering decisions. The manager is expected to write code, build prototypes, and review pull requests on a regular basis, and will partner with Staff Engineers and feature leads to verify progress, identify misalignment, and follow work through to release.

The ideal candidate combines strong people leadership with deep iOS engineering knowledge, sound technical judgment, and a disciplined approach to execution. This manager will help the team ship faster while maintaining the architecture, performance, reliability, quality, and technical health readers expect from The Washington Post’s flagship mobile experience. The role is data-driven: priorities, estimates, improvements, and results are tracked against agreed baselines and measured by evidence, such as time to users, commitments met, blocker resolution time, and app stability and performance, not by activity or opinion.

What Motivates You

• You want to help bring The Washington Post’s journalism to readers through high-quality mobile experiences.

• You measure success by the value delivered to users and how quickly it reaches them.

• You develop engineers through direct feedback and clear expectations, and you judge your impact by their growth.

• You care about predictable execution. You know the real remaining work, test whether estimates and status reports are credible, and surface risk before it becomes a missed commitment.

• You want to stay technically hands-on, writing code, prototyping, and reviewing pull requests to solve problems, evaluate approaches, and stay connected to the systems your team builds.

• You care deeply about mobile architecture, application quality, performance, reliability, and maintainability.

• You enjoy removing blockers and working across engineering and product teams to move complex work forward, while leaving ownership with the people who hold it.

• You hold yourself to the standard you set for others: you own your commitments, communicate risk early, and confirm that issues are closed.

• You look for wasted effort and ways to improve how teams work, and you measure whether those improvements create value.

• You enjoy building AI agents and automation that solve real mobile engineering problems, and you care about proving that they work and that people actually use them.

• You stay current on the iOS ecosystem, including new Apple platform releases, Swift language and concurrency changes, and AI-assisted development in Xcode, and you know which changes are worth adopting and when.

How You’ll Support the Mission

• Lead and develop the software engineers responsible for The Washington Post’s iOS app, providing timely feedback, career development, performance management, and coaching that builds independent ownership and accountability.

• Establish priorities and assignments, set delivery baselines, and track progress against estimates through to availability for users. Report on measures such as time to users, commitments met by the agreed date, and blocker resolution time, and surface material delivery risks early with clear facts, tradeoffs, and decisions needed.

• Address performance concerns promptly and directly, set clear expectations, and confirm that behavior and results improve.

• Partner with the Android Manager, Staff Engineers, Product, feature leads, and shared teams to sequence work, resolve dependencies and blockers, and keep mobile initiatives aligned without taking over others’ ownership.

• Provide technical leadership across iOS architecture and development in partnership with Staff Engineers, helping the team make sound decisions on application design, performance, testing, maintainability, and platform best practices across Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, Objective-C, and Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP).

• Track changes in the iOS ecosystem, including new Apple OS releases and design updates, Swift and Swift Concurrency evolution, and agentic and AI-assisted tooling in Xcode, and turn them into clear recommendations on what the team should adopt, when, and at what cost.

• Stay hands-on by writing code, building prototypes, and reviewing pull requests to solve technical problems, evaluate approaches, and set the quality bar for the team.

• Establish and reinforce engineering practices that support robust testing, code quality, application performance, reliable releases, and the long-term health of the iOS platform.

• Identify bottlenecks, unnecessary work, technical debt, and opportunities to improve engineering processes and productivity, setting a baseline before each change and measuring the benefit afterward against its cost, rework, and any regressions.

• Partner with Product and engineering leadership to balance reader experience, business priorities, delivery commitments, and long-term technical health.

• Build and roll out AI agents and automation that solve iOS and mobile engineering problems, including crash and issue triage, test generation, code review assistance, release workflows, estimation, and detection of stalled work. Verify their output, keep human accountability for decisions, and measure whether they remove delay and effort or only move it.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 7+ years of professional native iOS development experience with the iOS SDK, including Swift and modern iOS tools and frameworks, and experience building and releasing production mobile applications.

• Substantial experience writing production iOS code and designing app architecture, including modular design, concurrency, performance, and testable code, with the ability to review pull requests and architecture proposals at a senior level, evaluate tradeoffs, and diagnose and fix defects.

• Experience directly managing software engineers, including coaching, career development, and performance management, with a record of timely, specific feedback and of coaching engineers toward independent ownership.

• Experience leading complex engineering work from planning and estimation through implementation, testing, release, and production support, including setting priorities, managing dependencies, identifying delivery risks, and revising forecasts as evidence changes.

• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, version control, and software delivery practices for production mobile applications.

• Strong communication and problem-solving skills, with experience partnering effectively with Product, senior technical contributors, other engineering teams, and cross-functional stakeholders, including escalating material risks promptly.

• Experience defining and using engineering metrics and delivery data, including baselines and targets, to identify bottlenecks, make decisions, and demonstrate improvement in team effectiveness.

• Working knowledge of the current iOS platform, Swift, and Xcode tooling.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience developing and releasing large-scale consumer iOS applications to the App Store.

• Experience with modern iOS technologies such as SwiftUI, UIKit, Swift Concurrency, App Intents, Apple’s latest design system, on-device AI frameworks, or comparable technologies; familiarity with Objective-C and Kotlin Multiplatform.

• Experience with mobile performance optimization, debugging, memory management, and application reliability.

• Experience integrating RESTful APIs, third-party SDKs, or other services into native mobile applications.

• Experience leading teams responsible for the full mobile application lifecycle, including architecture, development, automated testing, CI/CD, release, observability, and production support.

• Experience coordinating engineering work across iOS, Android, backend, platform, or other shared technical teams.

• Experience improving engineering productivity, delivery predictability, or development processes and measuring the impact of those improvements.

• Experience mentoring engineers across career levels and partnering effectively with Staff-level or other senior technical contributors.

• Hands-on experience building AI agents or automation that solve real iOS or mobile engineering problems, with verification of the output and measured benefit.

• Experience with agentic development workflows in Xcode and with connecting agents to engineering tools such as issue trackers, CI, crash reporting, and source control, for example through Model Context Protocol (MCP).

 

Collaboration makes us stronger. That’s why our offices are designed with open layouts, modern technology, and easy access to transportation. With certain exceptions for newsgathering and business travel, we work on-site five days a week.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage

• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match

• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave

• Nine paid holidays and two personal days

• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent

• Robust mental health resources

• Backup care and caregiver concierge services

• Gender affirming services

• Pet insurance

• Free Post digital subscription

• Leadership and career development programs

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status.

The salary range for this position is:

$144,600 - $241,100 Annual

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.