Senior Mobile Engineer
(React Native)

Most senior engineering jobs hand you a codebase that is already six years old and ask you to make it ten percent better. This is not that job. This is the first mobile engineer at OneCeylon, and the first commit in the mobile repository will be yours.

OneCeylon is, today, a web product. That has been a deliberate choice — a small team cannot build four things at once and do any of them well. But a travel platform belongs on a phone. A visitor standing in front of a Sinhala sign does not open a laptop. A backpacker comparing tuk-tuk fares on the way to Ella does not open a browser tab. For the real moments OneCeylon is built to help with, the browser is the wrong surface.

So we are hiring one person to build the mobile app. Not to join a mobile team — there is no mobile team — but to be the mobile team, for the first year, and then to hire the next two people onto it. You will pick the tools, design the architecture, choose the libraries, set the release cadence, and decide what "done" looks like. We will give you the product judgement of the whole company and then get out of the way.

The stack is not entirely open. We have strong priors toward React Native, because the overlap with our existing TypeScript codebase is where the productivity lives, and because the phones most of our visitors carry — from every country on the map — are a bewildering mix of iOS and mid-range Android. A shared codebase is the only honest path to parity. But if the first week of technical due diligence convinces you we should use Expo, native Swift and Kotlin, or Flutter, we want to hear the argument.

What you will actually do

• Ship the first version. Set up the repository, the CI pipeline, the beta distribution, the crash reporting. Ship something a real traveller can install from TestFlight and Play Internal by the end of month three.
• Design the architecture from scratch. State management, navigation, offline-first strategy, authentication, deep linking, notifications, maps, camera — all the decisions that are almost impossible to unpick later, made carefully, now, by someone who has made them before.
• Build for a traveller's reality. 3G on a moving bus, camera access while holding a cup of king coconut, GPS that drifts inside a tea-country hotel. The app has to hold up in conditions the average San Francisco app never meets.
• Own the public 1.0 release. App Store and Play Store, with real users, by the end of month eight. You write the release notes. You file the review responses. You know before support does when something is wrong.
• Bring SerendAI onto the phone. Live weather, photo translation, place cards, transit directions — the capabilities that live in our web product today need a camera-first, offline-aware mobile counterpart. You lead that integration.
• Collaborate closely with the web and backend teams. Our existing TypeScript codebase has a lot you will want to share — API clients, schemas, validation logic. Part of the work is drawing the line between what lives in a shared package and what lives only on the phone.
• Hire your team. Once the 1.0 is out, you will hire the next two mobile engineers onto the team. We will back you with budget, a recruiter, and honest conversations about what kind of team you want to build.
• Write at least one engineering post a year for the OneCeylon notebook — on your timeline, on a topic you choose.

What we think you will need

• Five or more years building production mobile applications, including at least two in React Native.
• At least one app you have shipped end-to-end to both the App Store and the Play Store, that real people used, that you can talk about candidly.
• Deep comfort with TypeScript. Enough native iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin) knowledge to read a stack trace, write a small module, and know when to reach for one.
• A working theory of mobile performance — what is slow, why it is slow, and how you prove it. Greenfield is not an excuse for lazy architecture; the opposite, in fact.
• The judgement to say no. We will ask you to make trade-offs every week. Seniority here means choosing what not to build.
• The habit of writing clearly. Good commit messages. Pull requests that explain themselves. Design docs that get decisions made.

Nice, but not needed

• Experience setting up a mobile engineering practice from scratch — CI, code signing, release trains, on-call rotations.
• Work on apps in markets with inconsistent connectivity, or apps that rely heavily on maps, camera, or location.
• Travel, hospitality, or local-services industry experience. You will be surprised how much it helps to have already thought about time zones, currencies, and itineraries before day one.
• Experience integrating AI or ML features into mobile — SerendAI's photo translation and live transit features will be your second-year project.
• Sinhala or Tamil language skills. Not required, but welcomed.

What you get in return

• LKR 450,000 to 700,000 per month, reviewed honestly every twelve months.
• Meaningful equity on a four-year vest. This is a founding engineering role, and the grant reflects that.
• Health insurance for you, your partner, and your children.
• A machine that runs the build in under a minute — your choice of MacBook Pro configuration, plus the iOS and Android test devices you need, no approval process.
• Twenty-one days of paid leave, and a company that genuinely wants you to take all of them.
• A monthly book allowance, uncapped within reason and never audited.
• The thing most jobs do not offer: the chance to build something from the first line, with enough runway to do it properly, and customers already waiting.

How to apply

Email careers@oneceylon.tech with the subject line OC-ENG-01. Attach your CV, a link to something you have built (public repo, App Store listing, a video of an app in action — anything concrete), and a short paragraph on how you would approach the first ninety days of this role. No cover letter, no essays. We will write back within five working days, every time.