Manager Engineering
Delivery Hero · Dubai
Company Description
About Us:
talabat is the leading food and grocery delivery platform across the MENA region, serving customers in 9 countries. Our mobile apps are the primary interface for hundreds of thousands of daily orders — and the engineering behind them directly shapes how millions of people eat, shop, and experience convenience. We're part of the Delivery Hero network spanning 50+ countries.
Job Description
About this role:
We're looking for a Mobile Engineering Manager to lead one of our mobile engineering teams building the talabat consumer experience on iOS and Android. You'll own the delivery of features that millions of users interact with daily — from discovery and ordering to real-time tracking and payments.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You won't be writing code daily, but you'll be close enough to the codebase to make informed architectural decisions, unblock your engineers, and maintain high technical standards. You'll lead a team of 6–10 mobile engineers and partner closely with product, design, and backend teams.
We practice eXtreme Programming (XP) principles — including pair programming, TDD, and continuous delivery. If you haven't worked in an XP environment before, that's fine — what matters is that you believe quality enables speed and you're excited to lead in this way.
What you'll do:
- Lead a team of 6–10 mobile engineers (iOS and Android) through planning, building, and shipping customer-facing features
- Own mobile release quality — drive testing strategy, monitor crash rates and performance metrics, and maintain release cadence
- Partner with product managers and designers to shape what gets built, balancing user impact with technical feasibility
- Make architectural decisions on mobile patterns (modularisation, dependency injection, reactive patterns, navigation architecture)
- Coach and develop engineers through regular 1:1s, pairing sessions, and career development conversations
- Manage cross-team dependencies with backend, platform, and infrastructure teams
- Contribute to mobile engineering standards and practices across talabat
What success looks like:
- By 90 days: You understand the mobile codebase, the team's delivery rhythm, and key stakeholder relationships. You've completed 1:1s with every team member and have a clear picture of strengths and growth areas.
- By 6 months: Your team is shipping incremental value consistently. You've measurably improved at least one dimension of team health — whether that's cycle time, test coverage, onboarding speed, or engineer satisfaction.
- By 12 months: You've shaped the technical roadmap for your area, developed at least one engineer toward their next career milestone, and established yourself as a trusted partner to product and design leadership.
Qualifications
You must have
- 6+ years of hands-on mobile engineering experience (iOS, Android, or Flutter)
- 2+ years leading and managing mobile engineering teams (hiring, performance, career development)
- Deep understanding of mobile app architecture — you can evaluate trade-offs between native vs cross-platform, modular vs monolithic, and different state management approaches
- Experience shipping mobile apps at scale (100K+ DAU) with a focus on performance, reliability, and user experience
- Strong automated testing mindset — you believe in CI/CD for mobile and have driven testing culture in a team
- Experience with mobile release management, feature flagging, and gradual rollouts
- Comfort working in a fast-paced, iterative environment where priorities shift based on customer data
Bonus if you have:
- Experience with XP practices (TDD, pair/mob programming, trunk-based development)
- Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) or event-driven architecture
- Experience with Swift/SwiftUI and Kotlin/Jetpack Compose specifically
- Background in e-commerce, delivery, or marketplace mobile apps
- AWS or cloud platform experience
- Experience working across time zones or with distributed teams
This role is for you if...
- You get energy from growing engineers, not just shipping code
- You care about mobile craft — smooth animations, fast launch times, accessible interfaces
- You're comfortable making technical calls even when the data is incomplete
- You want to lead at a company where mobile IS the product, not an afterthought
This role is NOT for you if...
- You want a pure people-management role with no technical depth
- You prefer stable, slow-moving environments with long planning cycles
- You're not comfortable with pair programming or collaborative coding practices
Additional Information
Your career growth path:
Talabat operates a structured career framework with clearly defined levels for engineering leaders. As a Mobile Engineering Manager, you'll enter an established progression that rewards growing impact, strategic ownership, and people leadership:
- Engineering Manager — You lead a single team, own delivery and people development, and build the engineering culture within your squad. Your direct impact is at the squad and domain level.
- Senior Engineering Manager — You lead multiple teams or a full domain. You set technical direction across squads, grow the next generation of managers, and own domain-level strategy with a longer planning horizon.
- Engineering Director — You lead engineering across a tribe or multiple domains. You define technical vision, partner with senior business leaders, and are accountable for quality and delivery at scale.
- Senior Engineering Director — You lead engineering across multiple tribes or an entire product line. You shape company-wide technical strategy, build director-level talent, and represent engineering at the executive level.