Lead Engineer, Activity Apps

Become a Part of the NIKE, Inc. Team

NIKE, Inc. does more than outfit the world’s best athletes. It’s a place where passionate individuals come together to create the future of sport. We are unapologetic about who we are and what we’re after - bringing innovation and inspiration to every athlete* in the world. We look for athletes who can push boundaries, elevate our potential and continue leading us to greatness. The next tastemakers, playmakers, risk takers and glue players. Are you game?

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

The Activity Apps team builds and operates Nike Run Club (NRC) and Nike Training Club (NTC) - the mobile experiences that move millions of Nike athletes through runs, workouts, training plans, and guided coaching every day. As a Lead Engineer, you’ll be one of the senior technical voices on the team, partnering daily with Principal Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product, Design, Sport Science, and squads across iOS, Android, wearables, and the backend services that power activity at Nike. This role reports to the Engineering Manager for Activity Apps and works closely with peers across mobile platform, athlete, and coaching content teams.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Nike is seeking a Lead Software Engineer who combines strong architectural instincts with a hands-on delivery mindset and a passion for consumer mobile at scale. You’ll set the technical direction for a squad or a critical feature area within NRC or NTC, lead the design and execution of complex features end-to-end, and elevate the engineers around you through code review, design leadership, and mentorship. The ideal candidate is a senior IC ready to own the hardest problems on the team - background workout reliability, sensor accuracy, watch-to-phone sync, content delivery - and pull the rest of the squad up with them.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience shipping consumer mobile applications; Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Expert proficiency in Swift/SwiftUI or Kotlin/Compose (or both), with a track record of delivering features in high-scale consumer apps
• Deep experience with the systems that make activity apps work: Core Location / FusedLocationProvider, Core Motion / SensorManager, background execution and lifecycle, audio session management, push and silent-push pipelines, and durable offline session storage
• Hands-on experience with companion-device work on watchOS and/or Wear OS - phone-to-watch sync, standalone workouts, state reconciliation
• Working familiarity with HealthKit and Health Connect / Google Fit, and integrations with third-party fitness devices and services (Apple Watch, Garmin, Strava-class partners)
• Fluency in modern mobile CI/CD, testing, and release practices (Xcode, Gradle, Fastlane, App Store Connect, Google Play, feature flagging, experimentation)
• Proven ability to lead technical design reviews, break down ambiguous problems, and drive cross-squad alignment on architecture and standards
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable authoring design docs and technical strategy for a mixed audience of engineers, product, and design
• Experience with Spec Driven Development leveraging LLM coding agents and autonomous build and review loops

WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON

You’ll be the technical lead for a squad or a critical feature area inside NRC or NTC - the person the team looks to for hard architectural calls, complex feature design, and quality standards. Your work directly shapes the athlete’s day-to-day experience of running and training with Nike.

• Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of high-impact features across iOS, Android, and companion wearables - from spec refinement through shipped release and post-launch telemetry
• Own the technical health of your area: architecture, code quality, test coverage, performance, crash-free rate, and battery/thermal budgets
• Contribute directly to the workout session stack - sensor capture, GPS pipelines, background reliability, recovery from process death, durable upload - so every started workout becomes a saved workout
• Drive cross-squad initiatives that consolidate fragmented paths across NRC and NTC, defining reusable patterns and migrating legacy code toward them
• Partner with the Principal Engineer and Engineering Manager on multi-quarter technical planning for your area, translating platform strategy into concrete quarterly deliverables
• Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and structured feedback; raise the technical bar in code review across the squad
• Partner with Security, Privacy, and Platform teams to keep athlete data - location, health, biometric - safe, compliant, and trustworthy
• Contribute to communities of practice around Mobile Architecture, Observability, Performance, and Wearables; represent your squad in cross-team technical forums
• Adopt and champion AI-native development practices on the team - internal AI tooling, code assistance, evaluation harnesses - and share what’s working with the broader engineering org

NIKE, Inc. is a growth company that looks for team members to grow with it. Nike offers a generous total rewards package, casual work environment, a diverse and inclusive culture, and an electric atmosphere for professional development. No matter the location, or the role, every Nike employee shares one galvanizing mission: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.

NIKE, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability.

*If you have a body, you are an athlete.

We offer a number of accommodations to complete our interview process including screen readers, sign language interpreters, accessible and single location for in-person interviews, closed captioning, and other reasonable modifications as needed. If you discover, as you navigate our application process, that you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please complete the Candidate Accommodation Request Form.