Principal Android Engineer

About the role

At Arlo, we're passionate about creating innovative and reliable solutions that help people protect what matters most to them. Our team is dedicated to delivering products that exceed our customers' expectations, while always pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the world of protection technology. We believe that everyone deserves to feel safe and secure, whether they're at home or away, and we're committed to providing our customers with the peace of mind they need to live their lives without worry.

The Principal Android Engineer will own the architectural vision for the Arlo Android app and the team that builds it. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll spend real time in the codebase — designing, prototyping, reviewing, and shipping — while also raising the bar for architecture, quality, and engineering practice across the whole Android team.

Responsibilities

• Own the architectural vision for the Android app and drive it from proposal to production — modularization, state management, navigation, networking, and the patterns the rest of the team builds on.
• Lead by example in the codebase: ship meaningful features and platform improvements yourself, and set the standard for what "good" looks like through your own pull requests.
• Tackle the hardest technical problems on the app — real-time video streaming, latency, reliability of security notifications, background execution, and battery/performance constraints.
• Drive large-scale refactors and migrations (e.g., to Jetpack Compose, to a cleaner module graph, to modern async patterns) with a pragmatic, incremental plan that keeps the app shippable throughout.
• Define and uphold engineering standards: testing strategy, code review culture, CI/CD, release health, crash-free rates, and performance budgets.
• Mentor and grow engineers across levels — through pairing, design reviews, RFCs, and day-to-day technical guidance.
• Partner closely with product, design, backend/firmware, and QA to shape what's feasible and sequence work sensibly across teams.
• Make build-vs-buy and technology-selection decisions, and document the reasoning so the team can move fast with confidence.
• Champion observability and debuggability — logging, tracing, crash and ANR triage, and the tooling that makes production issues findable.

Requirements

• Android & Kotlin depth
• Expert-level Kotlin, including coroutines and Flow for structured concurrency and reactive state
• Deep knowledge of the Android framework and platform internals: the activity/fragment and component lifecycles, process death and state restoration, the threading model, and how the system schedules and kills work
• Strong command of Jetpack libraries (Compose, ViewModel, Navigation, Room, WorkManager, DataStore, Media3/ExoPlayer)
• Modern app architecture in practice — unidirectional data flow (MVVM/MVI), clean separation of concerns, and well-defined module boundaries — with the judgment to know when to bend the rules.
• Architecture & scale
• Proven experience designing and evolving a large, multi-module Android codebase, including Gradle build configuration and build-time optimization
• Dependency injection at scale (Hilt/Dagger) and the trade-offs involved
• A track record of leading migrations and refactors in a live, high-traffic app without halting feature delivery.
• Quality & delivery
• Real testing strategy across unit, integration, and UI layers (JUnit, Turbine, Compose testing, Espresso/UI Automator), and the discipline to make tests a help rather than a burden
• Hands-on with CI/CD for mobile (build pipelines, automated checks, staged/phased rollouts, feature flags)
• Performance engineering: profiling and fixing jank, memory leaks, slow cold starts, and excessive wakeups/battery drain using tools like the Android Studio profilers, Perfetto/systrace, Baseline Profiles, and Macrobenchmark.
• Leducation and experience
• The ability to influence without authority — aligning engineers around a direction through clear writing, strong design reviews, and credible code
• Excellent technical communication: you can make a complex trade-off legible to both a junior engineer and a VP
• A mentoring instinct and genuine investment in growing the people around you.

Qualifications

• Real-time media & streaming — WebRTC, RTSP, or peer-to-peer video; low-latency live view; two-way audio; and media playback/seek for recorded events (Media3/ExoPlayer, codecs, adaptive bitrate).
• IoT / connected-device experience — device provisioning and onboarding flows over BLE and Wi-Fi, pairing, firmware-update UX, and handling the long tail of connectivity and state-sync edge cases.
• Reliable notifications — FCM/push at scale where a missed or delayed alert is a real problem, including notification channels, priority, and the realities of OEM background restrictions and Doze/App Standby.
• Background & foreground services — long-running and time-sensitive work under modern Android background-execution limits, with careful attention to battery management.
• Security & privacy on-device — encryption, secure credential and token storage (Keystore, EncryptedSharedPreferences/DataStore), biometric auth, and certificate handling.
• Networking robustness — designing for offline-first behavior, retries, backoff, and graceful degradation on poor connections.
• Resilience across the device matrix — handling fragmentation across OEMs, OS versions, and screen sizes, including aggressive battery managers on certain manufacturers.

Skills

• AI leadership
• Set the team's strategy for AI-assisted development — where AI tools genuinely accelerate work (boilerplate, test scaffolding, migrations, refactors, documentation, exploration) and where human judgment must stay in the loop.
• Define the guardrails that keep quality high: review standards for AI-generated code, architectural and security boundaries it must respect, and clear expectations that engineers understand and own every line they ship regardless of how it was produced.
• Build the practices and prompts/patterns that let the team get reliable results from AI tools, and codify them so the whole team benefits rather than each engineer reinventing them.
• Evaluate and pilot AI tooling pragmatically, measuring real impact on delivery speed and code health, and retiring what doesn't earn its place.
• Guard against the failure modes — subtle bugs, insecure patterns, architectural drift, and over-reliance — by ensuring AI output is always held to the same testing, review, and design bar as anything else.

Benefits

Arlo is committed to inclusivity and selecting the strongest candidate—no matter their background. Even if you don’t meet every listed qualification, we encourage you to apply. We’re happy to support growth in areas essential to the role. Interested in learning more about our workplace? Visit and follow our LinkedIn, and Glassdoor pages to read employee insights and get updates of what it’s like to be part of Arlo.

Pay

The pay range for this position reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries at commencement of employment and is expected to be between USD$215,000-295,000/year. However, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including role, job-related knowledge, skills, relevant education and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including bonus, equity, and a full range of benefits. Details of all benefits will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.