Principal Software Engineer - Mobile

About Tripadvisor 

The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork.

The Tripadvisor Experiences Engineering team is distributed across Europe and is responsible for the platform, mobile apps and all their supporting infrastructure. We run the systems that help operators build their businesses and those which enable third parties to utilise our inventory. We provide the tools which help our customer services team provide world class service to travellers and operators internationally.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer experienced in mobile development to join our Tripadvisor Experiences team. We are unable to offer B2B contracts at this time. This role is open to candidates based within a commutable distance (generally up to 2 hours) of our office hub in Kraków. We embrace flexibility in where and how work gets done and also value meaningful in-person moments to connect and collaborate. You can expect a remote-first working model with periodic in-person gatherings at your closest office for team connection, planning, or other key moments.

Would you like to build features end to end? Would you enjoy working with a large number of technologies? Do you like moving quickly, releasing features daily, working with other smart and talented engineers? If this sounds like you, we’d love to talk to you.

What you will do

• Drive the design and architecture of complex, scalable mobile application systems that underpin our customer-facing technology solutions. Capable of designing long-lasting mobile architectures to solve complex problems including performance, reliability, scalability, offline behaviour, consistency, and quality, often across an engineering pillar.
• Conduct design reviews at both the engineering pillar level and across the broader engineering organization, with a strong focus on mobile app architecture, platform evolution, and cross-platform integration.
• Lead generalisable improvements in mobile operational maturity for the platform, promoting best practices across areas such as release management, app stability, observability, performance monitoring, and incident response.
• Work closely with engineering managers, other principal and senior principal engineers to drive technology strategy and roadmap that aligns with the wider organisation or group vision.
• Partner with Product Manager(s) and Engineering Manager(s) to establish clear technical delivery milestones for key mobile initiatives and help drive delivery within the agreed scope, quality, and timelines.
• Build trusted leadership by being regarded as a go-to person across a wide number of mobile technologies, development practices, and tools used within an engineering pillar or group.
• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders to ensure alignment on project goals, technical trade-offs, commitments, and timelines.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of experience in commercial software development, with significant experience delivering large-scale native mobile applications.
• Demonstrated excellence in working with cross-functional teams in fast-paced environments, providing both hands-on technical leadership and effective cross-team collaboration.
• Excellent command of tools and techniques for troubleshooting mobile production issues, including crash analysis, performance diagnostics, and release health.
• Strong experience designing and evolving scalable mobile systems from conception through production operation.
• Deep understanding of mobile software architecture, design principles, and engineering best practices across iOS and Android ecosystems.
• Deep experience with mobile platforms iOS and Android, native languages including Swift, Kotlin, Objective-C, and Java, and modern mobile architectural patterns. Experience with shared code and cross-platform approaches such as Kotlin Multiplatform. Strong architectural understanding of mobile communication patterns such as REST and GraphQL and the broader mobile ecosystem including local data persistence, networking layers, authentication, offline and synchronisation strategies, and push notification systems.

What We Offer 

• Competitive compensation packages (routinely benchmarked against the latest industry data), including base salary and annual bonuses
• “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. Tripadvisor Group takes a remote-friendly approach to collaboration across a worldwide team, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like or as required by your team.
• Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
• Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
• Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
• Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
• Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
• Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
• Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
• Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.

Our Cultural Pillars:

Traveler first

We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us. 

Execution is our edge

We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges. 

We succeed together

The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.

If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at recruitment@tripadvisor.com. We have all the answers!