Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Android Architect

💰 $ - $

EngineeringMobileAndroid

🎯 Role Definition

As an Android Architect you will define and drive the technical vision for mobile Android products, translate product strategy into scalable architecture, and lead engineering teams to deliver high-quality, performant, secure Android applications. This role blends hands-on engineering, cross-functional leadership, and long-term platform design to enable rapid feature delivery, maintainability, and excellent user experience across a portfolio of Android apps and libraries.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Android Engineer with demonstrated system and architecture experience.
  • Mobile Tech Lead or Principal Mobile Engineer with multi-module and cross-team exposure.
  • Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager with Android product ownership responsibilities.

Advancement To:

  • Director of Mobile Engineering
  • Head of Platform / VP of Engineering (Mobile)
  • Chief Architect / Enterprise Architect with cross-platform responsibilities

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Architect (cross-platform mobile & backend)
  • Client-side Architect (iOS/Android unified mobile architecture)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and document a modular, testable Android platform with Clean Architecture or similar layered patterns that supports rapid feature delivery and long-term maintainability across multiple product teams.
  • Design and own the Android app architecture, module boundaries, and shared libraries (UI kits, networking, analytics, feature toggles) to reduce duplication and accelerate developer onboarding.
  • Lead hands-on implementation of complex features in Kotlin and Java, including leveraging modern Android frameworks such as Jetpack Compose, AndroidX, ViewModel, LiveData, Coroutines, and Flow.
  • Define and enforce best practices for state management (MVVM, MVI, unidirectional data flow), dependency injection (Hilt/Dagger), and reactive streams (Kotlin Flow / RxJava) across Android teams.
  • Create and maintain a scalable CI/CD pipeline for Android applications using Gradle, Bazel (if used), Fastlane, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins, ensuring reproducible builds, automated testing, and safe Play Store releases (AAB signing, rollout strategies).
  • Establish automated testing strategies: unit testing, UI/instrumented testing (Espresso, UI Automator), integration testing, and contract testing to maintain application quality and reduce regression risk.
  • Lead performance engineering initiatives: profile and optimize app startup, rendering, memory allocation, battery consumption and network usage using Android Profiler, LeakCanary, Systrace and other tools.
  • Define migration strategies and compatibility layers to manage Android API level fragmentation and OEM differences while minimizing technical debt and user impact.
  • Drive security architecture for Android apps including secure storage, key management, SSL pinning, obfuscation (R8/ProGuard), tamper detection, and adherence to OWASP Mobile Top 10 risk mitigation.
  • Design robust offline-first and synchronization strategies (SQLite, Room, DataStore, Realm, or other local caching) and define conflict resolution approaches for unreliable networks.
  • Own the API contract strategy and collaborate with backend teams on REST/GraphQL/gRPC design, pagination, caching, and error-handling patterns that optimize mobile performance and bandwidth.
  • Lead code review and architecture review processes; set code standards, lint rules, static analysis, and quality gates to ensure consistency across repositories.
  • Mentor and coach Android engineers on architecture principles, design patterns, Kotlin idioms, and modern Android development tools to increase team velocity and quality.
  • Drive modularization and multi-flavor build configurations to support feature teams, AB testing, and parallel release tracks while optimizing build times.
  • Create and maintain an internal component library or design system that ensures UI consistency, accessibility, localization readiness, and support for dynamic theming.
  • Plan and execute migrations to modern UI frameworks (for example from XML-based UIs to Jetpack Compose) with minimal user disruption and clear rollback plans.
  • Define telemetry and observability requirements for mobile products: crash reporting (Crashlytics), performance monitoring, user behavior analytics, and SLOs to inform data-driven product decisions.
  • Collaborate closely with Product, UX, QA and Backend teams to translate product requirements into robust technical designs, delivery roadmaps and prioritized implementation plans.
  • Participate in capacity planning, sprint estimation and technical roadmap definition; make tradeoffs between speed-to-market and long-term platform health.
  • Architect solutions for multi-process, multi-window, wearable, foldable and automotive Android form factors where applicable, ensuring graceful UI and lifecycle handling.
  • Lead technical post-mortems and continuous improvement initiatives after incidents, defining remediation plans and preventive measures to improve reliability.
  • Evaluate, select, and standardize third-party SDKs and tools, managing costs, license compliance, and runtime footprint to minimize risk and maintain app performance.

Secondary Functions

  • Establish cross-team onboarding materials, sample apps, and architecture guides that accelerate new engineer productivity and reinforce platform standards.
  • Maintain and evolve a mobile developer experience (DX) including local development tooling, fast deploys, hot-reload, and reproducible dev environments.
  • Work with Release Engineering and SRE to automate Play Store releases, staged rollouts, and crash analytics triage as part of release readiness.
  • Contribute to recruiting by defining role profiles, interviewing candidates for senior mobile roles, and representing the company in external technical forums and conferences.
  • Support platform budgeting and procurement decisions for mobile-specific services (CI/CD, crash analytics, performance monitoring, feature flagging).
  • Assist product teams with technical due diligence and feasibility assessments for new features, partnerships, or integrations with third-party services.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-level Android development experience with Kotlin; strong background in Java for legacy codebases and interoperability.
  • Deep knowledge of Android Framework and Jetpack libraries (Compose, Navigation, WorkManager, Room, Paging, Lifecycle).
  • Proven experience designing and implementing Clean Architecture, MVVM, MVI or similar scalable architectural patterns.
  • Familiarity with dependency injection frameworks (Hilt, Dagger) and service locator patterns.
  • Strong skills in asynchronous programming and concurrency: Kotlin Coroutines, Flow, and/or RxJava.
  • Proficiency in Gradle tooling, build optimization, multi-module setups and build cache strategies.
  • Practical experience with CI/CD for Android (Fastlane, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI), including automated signing and staged rollouts.
  • Experience with testing frameworks and strategies: JUnit, Mockito, Espresso, Robolectric, UI Automator, and instrumentation testing.
  • Performance profiling and optimization expertise: memory leaks, CPU usage, GPU, ANR reduction, and startup time improvements.
  • Security best practices on mobile: secure storage, encryption, certificate pinning, code obfuscation (R8), and threat modeling.
  • Familiarity with analytics and observability tools (Firebase, Crashlytics, Sentry, New Relic, Datadog) and establishing mobile SLOs.
  • Experience with API design and client-side caching strategies for REST, GraphQL, or gRPC clients; knowledge of pagination and incremental sync.
  • Knowledge of Play Store policies, app signing, AAB generation, and release management practices.
  • Experience building and maintaining internal libraries, SDKs, and shared components for consumption by multiple product teams.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and mentorship: able to synthesize technical direction and coach engineers at all levels.
  • Excellent cross-functional communication: explain architecture decisions to product, design and executive stakeholders.
  • Strategic thinking with a bias for measurable outcomes and pragmatic trade-offs between speed and long-term health.
  • Problem-solving mindset: able to decompose complex problems into implementable, testable solutions.
  • Collaborative: works well in distributed, agile teams and drives consensus across engineering and product organizations.
  • Customer-focused: prioritizes user experience, accessibility, and performance in technical decisions.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning in evolving Android ecosystem and platform changes.
  • Strong documentation skills: produces clear architecture diagrams, RFCs, and migration plans.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.
  • Additional certifications or coursework in mobile security, architecture, or cloud services is a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Mobile Computing
  • Human-Computer Interaction (for UX-focused roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8+ years in software development with 4+ years focused on Android platform architecture or senior technical leadership on Android products.

Preferred:

  • Proven track record as an Android Architect, Principal Engineer, or Mobile Tech Lead delivering consumer or enterprise-grade Android applications at scale.
  • Experience leading large codebase migrations, multi-team architecture initiatives, or building cross-product mobile platforms.
  • Prior experience in hiring, mentoring, and setting technical direction for mobile engineering teams.
Explore More Careers