The Role

As a Lead Software Engineer, you’ll wear two hats: driving complex technical projects from conception to delivery while coding alongside the team, and providing people leadership to a small group of direct reports (3–5 engineers). This role is designed to keep you technical—we aim for a 70/30 split between building and managing. This is hands-on technical leadership with meaningful people impact.

We’re building the next generation of sleep technology that seamlessly connects millions of IoT devices through complex mobile applications. Our iOS and Android apps handle real-time Bluetooth/Wi-Fi communication with hardware, process massive datasets, and maintain sub-second response times across distributed systems.

This role has broad scope across the mobile organization — you’ll collaborate across our three Hatch Pillars (Adult, Kids, Foundations) and partner with mobile engineers throughout the teams. This role also means stepping into AI-forward technical leadership. Hatch is all-in on AI-assisted development — it's not a future state, it's how we work today. The right person will help us continue raising the bar on how our engineers use these tools, set expectations for what good looks like, and model that for others.

You’ll play a meaningful role in work that spans the full Hatch product experience: transitioning from device-first to service-first experiences, launching AI-powered sleep chat to scale expert guidance, and building features that drive daily engagement. You’ll help shape the technical foundation across the mobile platform and contribute to initiatives that touch every part of what Hatch builds.

What You’ll Do

Week 1

• Ship your first code to production and begin to establish credibility with the engineering team.
• Review existing codebase and identify immediate technical improvements.

Within 3 Months

• Technical Leadership: Own delivery of major features, and jump into production issues or improvements, debug cross-platform problems spanning mobile/firmware/backend
• Cross-Pillar Ramp: Get hands-on across Pillar 0, 1, and 2 during your rotation, building context on how the full mobile platform fits together. Begin contributing meaningfully to your team’s initiatives — shipping features, improving platform reliability, and driving daily app engagement
• Project Ownership: Understand problem spaces, partner with stakeholders to shape project scope, and bring Engineering Requirements Docs (ERDs) to Engineering Forums
• People Management: Take on your direct reports. Establish regular 1:1 cadence with direct reports, providing feedback and discussing professional development
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product, Design, QA, and other stakeholders to scope, plan, and rapidly ship features
• AI Integration: Champion AI-assisted development practices within your team — not just using the tools yourself, but creating the conditions where others adopt them faster and go deeper.

Within 6 Months

• Technical Leadership: Lead cross-team technical initiatives, establish team standards for code quality, and mentor junior & senior engineers
• Navigate Project Ambiguity: Break down complex projects into concurrent tasks, advocate for incremental shipping, and share progress openly
• People Development: Set goals and learning plans for direct reports, identify growth opportunities, and guide them to be effective both technically and professionally
• Pillar Partnership: Serve as a strong Engineering partner to product and pillar leadership across the organization, building working relationships with leads throughout the mobile team. Help determine resourcing needs and drive your team toward business goals — with an eye on how your work connects to the platform as a whole
• Raise the AI Bar: Establish clear expectations around how the team uses AI tooling. Help define what "good" looks like so that as new engineers join, there's a standard to onboard into, not just an assumption.

After 1 Year

• Strategic Impact: Drive business strategy through mobile initiatives and shape the roadmap across the mobile organization — contributing to platform decisions that benefit all pillars and the people who use Hatch every night
• Team Building: Assist with identifying resource needs, actively participate in hiring, and help onboard new engineers
• Process Optimization: Collaborate with teams and business partners to develop processes that enable the organization to deliver business value quickly
• Performance & Growth: Conduct performance reviews and represent your direct reports’ development to leadership

What You’ll Bring

• Deep Mobile Craft: You’ve spent 6+ years building mobile apps that matter—whether in Swift/SwiftUI or Kotlin/Jetpack Compose. You care about code quality, reliability, and making great experiences for real people
• Technical Leadership: You love leading by example—writing production code, unblocking others, and helping teams make smart, pragmatic decisions. You’re as comfortable setting direction as you are rolling up your sleeves
• People Growth: You believe great teams make great products. You’ve managed and/or mentored engineers, built trust, and created environments where people do their best work
• Collaborative Energy: You thrive in cross-functional spaces—partnering with Product, Design, and other engineering leaders to turn ideas into reality. You communicate clearly and lead with empathy
• AI Leadership: You don't just follow AI trends — you shape how your team works with them. You're already using AI tools to build faster, think sharper, and raise the bar on what's possible. You'll help set the standard for how Hatch's mobile team continues to evolve as the tooling does.
• Broad Technical Reach: You bring experience with modern mobile tooling, CI/CD, testing, and cloud services—and you’re always eager to explore new technologies, tech stacks, and approaches

Deal Breakers

• Need extensive mobile onboarding or mentoring on technical leadership
• Haven’t led complex technical projects or managed direct reports
• Looking for pure management or pure IC role
• Unable to balance hands-on coding (70%) with people leadership (30%)
• Not interested in partnering closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders
• Needs full clarity before acting — you'll be expected to drive through ambiguity, not wait for it to resolve.