Staff Engineer (Android)

Job Description

The Staff Engineer (Android) is the senior technical authority for Android engineering at Admiral, responsible for defining platform strategy, architecture, and technical standards that enable scalable, reliable, and high-quality mobile experiences.

Operating as a hands-on senior individual contributor, this role delivers enterprise-level impact by shaping technical direction, influencing cross-functional stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and solving the organisation’s most complex mobile challenges.

The role has minimal direct people management, and exerts significant influence across squads, platforms, and the wider Admiral Mobile engineering community.

Why This Role Matters at Admiral

This role is critical to enabling Admiral’s mission through a modern, reliable Android platform. The Staff Engineer (Android) ensures the technology underpinning this mission is robust, scalable, and future-ready.

Key Accountabilities

Technical Strategy & Architecture:

• Define and own the Android platform architecture aligned to Admiral’s long-term business and technology strategy.
• Lead the design of scalable, modular, secure Android solutions supporting customer acquisition, onboarding, policy management, and payments.
• Act as the final technical authority for Android-related architectural decisions.
• Identify and manage technical risk, debt, and dependencies across teams.

Complex Problem Solving & Delivery:

• Design and implement highly complex Android features with significant customer and business impact.
• Solve ambiguous, systemic problems (performance, reliability, scalability, platform evolution).
• Lead investigations into major incidents, root causes, and long-term fixes.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.

Engineering Standards & Quality:

• Define Android engineering standards, best practices, and development guidelines.
• Ensure strong adoption of testing, CI/CD, observability, and performance monitoring.
• Champion quality, accessibility, security, and compliance in a regulated environment.
• Influence platform-wide consistency across Admiral.

Leadership, Influence & Mentorship:

• Act as a technical leader and mentor to Android and mobile engineers.
• Provide technical guidance, reviews, and coaching without formal line management.
• Influence Product, Design, Backend, and Leadership teams through expertise and trust.
• Represent Android engineering in senior technical forums and cross-domain initiatives.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement:

• Stay at the forefront of Android and mobile technology trends.
• Evaluate emerging tools and frameworks (e.g. Jetpack Compose, Kotlin Multiplatform).
• Propose and lead innovation initiatives that improve customer experience, developer productivity, or platform resilience.
• Contribute to Admiral Pioneer communities of practice and knowledge sharing.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

Essential:

• Deep expert-level knowledge of Android development, Kotlin, Android SDK, and Jetpack libraries.
• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale, customer-facing mobile applications.
• Strong architectural expertise (Clean Architecture, modularisation, MVVM/MVI).
• Advanced understanding of mobile performance, security, and reliability.
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and make strategic technical decisions.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity with minimal direction.

Desirable:

• Experience in insurance, fintech, mobility, or other regulated industries.
• Exposure to Kotlin Multiplatform, platform unification, or shared-domain architectures.
• Experience contributing to cross-organisation technical strategies.
• Public technical contributions (open source, talks, internal frameworks).

Admiral: Where You Can

We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We’re committed to fostering a people-first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.

Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.

We’re proud of our people-first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We’re fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.

Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work-life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.

Disability Confident Leader

As a Disability Confident Leader, for candidates with a disability or long-term health condition, that opt into the Disability Confident scheme, we’ll invite a fair and proportionate number of applicants that meet the essential requirements of the role to the first stage of our selection process.

If you need any adjustments or support with your application or during the recruitment process, just let us know. Please do email us or contact us on 07386666328. This number is dedicated to supporting candidates that require reasonable adjustments or support during the application process.

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