Job Description

About SmartNews

SmartNews is a global leader in redefining information and news discovery, committed to providing users with accurate, timely information and supporting quality journalism. We combine the power of our unique machine-learning technology with the expertise of our first-rate editorial team to bring news that matters to millions of users from our over 3,000 global publishing partners.

Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan, SmartNews has offices in Tokyo, Palo Alto, New York, and Singapore.

The Team & Mission:

The mobile engineering team builds a robust core foundation and delivers innovative features to support product iterations and drive growth across our JP and US products.

Your mission is to deliver high-impact, user-delighting product features while continuously improving our mobile codebase to be faster, safer, and easier to develop on. You’ll collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers across JP and US time zones to turn ideas into polished user experiences, and go deep on core foundations—performance, scalability, architecture, and developer tooling—to help future features ship even faster.

A proactive mindset and curiosity are highly valued. You’ll have the opportunity to take ownership, contribute ideas, raise the technical bar across the organization, mentor peers, and drive engineering-led initiatives that unlock product growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design, development, and performance optimization of a consumer iOS app serving tens of millions of users.
• Partner with product, design, data, backend, and Android teams across regions to ship user-delighting features that drive business growth.
• Elevate the mobile architecture by adopting modern iOS and Swift capabilities, boosting both user experience and engineering velocity.
• Profile and refactor UI and foundational code to ensure smooth scrolling, low memory footprint, and crash-free sessions.
• Own the on-call rotation, swiftly troubleshoot live incidents, and drive root-cause analysis to maintain stellar uptime and user trust.
• Build rapid prototypes that visualize ideas, quantify impact, and guide product direction.
• Tackle technical challenges with curiosity, creativity, and a metrics-focused mindset, continuously raising the bar for quality and performance.

Requirements

Required Experience

• 4 + years building and shipping large-scale iOS apps
• Expert-level Swift, plus Objective-C proficiency for legacy integration
• Track record designing clean, testable APIs and maintaining healthy codebases with unit and UI automation
• Deep knowledge of concurrency, memory management, and Instruments-based profiling; can hunt down jank, leaks, and crashes with data-driven rigor
• Strong foundation skills: modular architecture (MVC, MVVM, VIPER, or similar), dependency injection, build tooling (Xcode, SPM, etc), and CI-friendly workflows
• Solid grasp of networking, offline caching, data persistence, and mobile security best practices
• Analytical mindset; comfortable turning performance metrics into actionable engineering improvements
• Proactive communicator who collaborates across time zones
• Business-level English

Nice to Have Experience

• Experience developing iOS applications from start to finish
• Experience with other programming languages
• Experience with mobile CI/CD, ideally on a customized cloud setup
• Experience working with cross-functional teams

Working Condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

Benefits

• All healthcare and social insurance required by the Japanese labor law, plus annual health check 

• Visa sponsorship and overseas relocation support available for eligible candidates

Job Tags

Similar Jobs