Growing As a Mobile Engineer

The book covers ways you can grow as a mobile engineer or engineering manager. Parts 1-3 of the book shares advice for iOS and Android engineers to grow to senior and above levels. It’s the suggestions I gave to people on my team, and the approaches that helped them level up. This growth was both professional – people becoming more effective engineers – and measured in levels: people getting that promotion to the next level. At Uber, these levels meant promotions to the L5 (senior) or L5B (senior 2) levels, as well as working with a few people on crafting a path to the L6 (staff) level. Part 4 is advice for mobile engineering managers. I have always found managing a group of mobile engineers to be seemingly more challenging, mostly as much of the business doesn’t always understand the complexity of mobile engineering challenges at scale. For larger mobile organizations, you’ll almost always realize the need for mobile platform teams: but how do you make this business case? And can “staying” in mobile slow your career growth in engineering management? Part 5 collects interesting mobile learnings from my time at Uber. Uber is one of the largest mobile apps and mobile organizations in the world, with over 300 native engineers, and apps that were the most downloaded application in the Travel and Food Delivery categories in 2019 (240M downloads) and in 2020 (177M). Working here for over four years, I share insights that can be useful at other high-growth companies.