At Dscout, we’re building the most flexible and powerful UX research platform on the market—trusted by the world’s top brands in finance (JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, Charles Schwab, PayPal), healthcare (Aya, Headspace), consumer goods (Keen, Verizon, Target, Northface), and tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Meta, Spotify, AirBnB). Our tools help teams deeply understand the humans behind their products, so they can build better ones. We are expanding our smart and driven team and would love for you to join us.
Our mobile apps are Swift and Kotlin. Our frontend is built with React. Our backend uses Elixir and increasingly more and more Python. GenAI has significantly impacted our system architecture, requiring us to adapt and evolve. We are in the midst of a shift from existing products augmented with AI to a full AI-first platform.
You Are:A Mobile Principal Software Engineer who will lead our mobile team and evolve it to meet the shifting demand of a full AI-first platform — on a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters. You're deeply hands-on with AI coding agents, and you've used them to ship serious work, not just autocomplete. You're as comfortable architecting a thin mobile client backed by a powerful API as you are dropping into our Python backend (with AI assist) to add what mobile needs. You'll shape our participant experience across mobile with heavy influence on the web too.
You're deeply product focused, energized by solving business problems, not just writing code. You ask "why" before "how," and you partner with Product and Design as a peer — shaping problems, not just taking specs. You know when to ship a scrappy prototype to test an assumption versus when to invest in a foundation built to last, and you can explain that call to a PM or designer. You can hold multiple projects in your head at once, spotting where they'll collide, depend on each other, or share a chance for reuse.
You bring Principal/Staff-level scope as a product engineer — 10+ years of experience evolving apps and standing up new ones across product and technical dimensions. You have a proven track record of leading technical improvements and mentoring other developers, as collaboration and empathy are cornerstones of our culture. You thrive setting your own direction with minimal input while staying aligned to company goals.
Most of all, you're energized by the prospect of doing in months what used to take years. If this sounds exciting, we'd love to hear from you.
The JobWorking hoursAvailability 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM CT
- Dscout is a US-based company, and while working these core hours is expected in this role, we know that from time-to-time life happens and we can be flexible to meet your needs.
- Lead our mobile team and its continued maturity and evolution in this AI-native space
- Stand up an AI-native development process for the mobile team — agents, evals, review loops — that sustains that pace beyond the rewrite
- Drive a thin-client architecture for the participant experience, pushing business logic to the backend so the apps stay simple
- Contribute Python to our AI backend service when mobile needs new capabilities — using AI agents to do it efficiently
- Set our participant API and broader participant platform direction beyond the mobile team
- Spend about 70% of your time supporting your product team; the other 30% on self-directed leadership tasks and platform improvements
- Drive continuous process improvement across the mobile team and its partner teams
- Mentor other engineers and help evolve the Engineering org
- Apply a DevOps mindset to improve the Continuous Delivery pipeline and other operational aspects of our SaaS & mobile platform
- Be involved in security and compliance efforts for the organization (we are SOC II & HITRUST certified)
- Significant experience as a mobile software engineer with Principal/Staff-level scope (titles aren’t important — we care about what you’ve shipped and led)
- Experience with iOS and Android, and a willingness to work outside the mobile ecosystem when the problem calls for it
- Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) — not just autocomplete — and an opinion on how to design an SDLC around them
- Experience in system architecture to supplement mobile experience (backend API design, databases, mobile devops), how it all fits together, and design trade-offs
- A proven track record of leading, mentoring, and growing engineers
- Expertise with cloud-based SaaS architectures and evolutionary design
- At home with agile, DevOps, CI/CD, observability/tracing, and data/metrics-based decision making
- A strong and competitive compensation package with a built-in bonus and equity program.
- An incredible and progressive benefits package (for both you and your dependents) to support work/life balance, including flexible PTO, 15 company holidays, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 401k match, and much more.
- An education stipend to support your growth & development, and a remote work stipend.
- A company that is open and transparent with our team. You will know what is happening and why it matters.
Location Flexibility: Dscout is proud to support a remote-first workforce and enable employees to work from almost anywhere. At this time, however, we are unable to hire in the following locations: Montana, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington DC.
Dscout Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
Dscout’s goal is to provide team members with the flexibility to decide their best way of working, meaning we operate as a remote-first company! We've also re-imagined our downtown Chicago HQ as a co-working space for those who want a shared place to work, or for teams looking for in-person time.
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