Lead Mobile Engineer, React Native
Posted 3 days 16 hours ago by Orca
Lead Mobile Engineer, React Native
Location: Madrid (Hybrid) Full-time Competitive compensation + equity
Shape the Future of Marine Navigation
Orca is reinventing how people navigate the sea-building the next-generation navigation platform for recreational boating. Our mobile-first experience already guides hundreds of thousands of boaters with features like real-time routing, weather overlays, and offline navigation.
We're looking for a Lead Mobile Engineer React Native to drive and scale the development of the Orca App. This is a hybrid role that blends hands-on engineering with technical and team leadership. Your success will come from architecting long-term solutions that endure, raising the bar for the team, and shaping an engineering culture centered on delivering high customer value.
What You'll Do
- Lead the mobile App team-own the app architecture, drive technical decisions, and ensure high-quality delivery.
- Mentor, support, and help grow a small team of talented React Native engineers.
- Balance hands-on contributions with coaching and technical guidance.
- Partner closely with Product, Design, and Backend to shape roadmap and execution.
- Build robust, performant, and reliable features like sail routing, weather layers, real-time navigation, and offline maps.
- Champion best practices in code quality, testing, performance, and release management.
- Contribute to hiring and onboarding as we scale the engineering team.
What You Bring
Technical Skills
- 7+ years of mobile development, including 5+ years building production React Native apps.
- Strong foundation in computer science principles and software architecture design.
- Expert-level knowledge of TypeScript, React, and modern front-end patterns.
- Hands-on experience upgrading React Native versions and managing related code migrations.
- Strong capability in profiling and optimization for performance and battery usage.
- Experience with app instrumentation for monitoring, analytics, and observability.
- Proficiency with native development in Java/Kotlin and Objective-C/Swift, including integration of native modules and working knowledge of TurboModules/JSI.
- Experience implementing and maintaining CI / CD pipelines for mobile applications.
Leadership & Execution
- Proven experience leading small engineering teams or technical projects.
- Strong systems thinker who balances short-term velocity with long-term maintainability.
- Clear communicator who can align teams, clarify tradeoffs, and push through ambiguity.
- Passion for product and UX-thinks like a customer and codes like an owner.
Why Join Orca?
- High ownership: Your work will directly impact thousands of users at sea.
- We're a small, fast-moving team with big ambitions and no unnecessary layers.
- Real-world impact: This isn't a typical consumer app-it's a mission-critical tool used in high-pressure, real-world scenarios.
- Great incentives: Competitive salary + equity in a well-funded, high-growth company.
- Global ambition: Join us early as we scale Orca to become the reference platform for boating worldwide-read more on our blog ().
Check out some features we've shipped:
- Navigation instruments -
- Weather for boaters -
- Guard Mode -
- Upgraded Logbook -
Apply Now
Send your CV and links to your work (GitHub, portfolio, apps) to .
Want to jump the queue? Try our coding challenge ()-we review submissions fast.