Principal Android Engineer

About Arlo: 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. Arlo’s deep expertise in AI- and CV-powered analytics, cloud services, user experience, product design, and innovative wireless and RF connectivity enables the delivery of a seamless, smart security experience for Arlo users that is easy to set up and interact with every day. Arlo's Android app is how millions of people keep an eye on what they care about — homes, businesses, pets, and family. Behind a simple "tap to see live video" experience sits a demanding system: low-latency streaming, reliable security notifications, device provisioning over flaky networks, and strict privacy and battery constraints. We're looking for a Principal Android Engineer to set the technical direction 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. What you'll do 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. Core skills we expect at this level 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 A 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. Leadership in practice 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. AI leadership AI coding tools are changing how Android teams work, and we want a Principal who treats that as an engineering responsibility rather than a novelty. The goal is to make the team meaningfully faster and stronger — without letting AI-generated code erode architecture, readability, or long-term maintainability. 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. Use AI to raise the floor and the ceiling — accelerating ramp-up for newer engineers while fre