Freelance Remote Unity Game Developer Jobs in Alabama

The Director of App Development owns the quality, evolution, and long-term vision of the software applications and web-based services that our customers use every day. This is the role that customers — and app store ratings — will hold accountable. It is a role defined by craft, judgment, and a genuine obsession with delivering experiences that delight.

This is not a straightforward leadership role. It carries three compounding challenges that require a rare combination of technical depth, strategic clarity, and execution discipline:

• Platform evolution: Our current apps are built on Microsoft MAUI (and Sync Fusion), a cross-platform framework that has enabled development speed but may be limiting the quality ceiling we can reach. This role will lead an honest, first-principles evaluation of our platform strategy — including whether native iOS and Android development is the right path — and own the decision and transition plan that follows.
• Parallel-track development: Over the next two years, this role must simultaneously maintain and improve our existing app while prototyping and building a next-generation experience. Both tracks matter. Neither can be sacrificed for the other.
• Web expansion: We are in the early stages of delivering our app services via web. This role owns that effort alongside mobile — building web features and services that meet the same quality bar as the apps our customers already know.

The right candidate has navigated platform transitions before, knows what great mobile and web experiences look like from the inside, and leads teams to produce work they are proud of.

Team Leadership

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of ~20 high-performing software engineers across mobile and web.
• Instill high standards — technically, professionally, and in terms of customer empathy — and challenge the team to reach its potential.
• Build a team culture where quality is a source of pride, not a tax on velocity.
• Manage 3–4 direct reports; invest in their growth as engineering leaders.

Technical Leadership

• Make sound, data-informed, and defensible technical decisions — especially on high-stakes questions like platform strategy and architectural direction.
• Lead the honest evaluation of our current MAUI-based approach: assess its long-term viability, model the cost and benefit of alternatives (including native development), and bring a clear recommendation with a credible transition plan.
• Guide the team to optimize for technical excellence and customer delight — even when that means making harder choices.
• Stay close enough to the work to ask the right questions, spot risks early, and maintain credibility with your engineers. Get your hands dirty strategically when and where it matters most.

Platform Strategy & First-Principles Thinking

• Do not accept the limitations of the current app as permanent. Evaluate development tools, frameworks, and approaches based on what delivers the best customer experience — not what is most convenient or already in place.
• Own the platform decision for mobile (cross-platform vs. native) and web – and build the roadmap that gets us there without abandoning current customers.
• Bring structure and rigor to technology decisions: document the rationale, model the tradeoffs, and build organizational confidence in the path forward.

Parallel-Track Execution: Current App & Future Experience

• Maintain and continuously improve the existing app — fixing bugs, improving performance, and shipping features that keep current customers engaged and satisfied.
• Simultaneously prototype, build, and iterate on a new app: an AI-powered next-generation experience that integrates voice and chat interfaces with our existing services.
• Own the front-end engineering for our new app — ensuring that AI-generated information is presented in a way that is digestible, actionable, and genuinely useful to customers in the field.
• Manage the tension between the two tracks deliberately: protect both, make tradeoffs transparently, and escalate resource conflicts before they become delivery failures.

Billing, Entitlements & Customer Data

• Own the engineering systems that handle customer billing — ensuring accuracy, security, and compliance with tax collection and remittance obligations.
• Ensure service provisioning and entitlement delivery are reliable and correctly reflect customer subscriptions at all times.
• Treat customer financial data with the highest standard of protection; lead security practices in this domain proactively.

Web Services Expansion

• Own the engineering delivery of our web-based services — building a web experience that meets the same quality bar as our mobile apps.
• Partner with Product and UX to define the right feature set and interaction model for web, which may differ meaningfully from mobile.
• Ensure consistency of experience and data across mobile and web surfaces.

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years leading mobile or full-stack engineering teams.
• Deep experience delivering high-quality consumer-facing mobile applications on iOS and/or Android.
• Demonstrated ability to make and defend platform or architectural decisions with clear, data-informed rationale.
• Experience managing parallel workstreams — maintaining existing products while building new ones — without letting either slip.
• Strong product sensibility: a genuine understanding of what makes a mobile experience feel great, and the drive to build it.
• Track record of improving app quality as measured by real customer signals (ratings, retention, support volume).
• Excellent communication skills — able to represent engineering clearly and credibly to non-technical leaders and partners.

Preferred

• Experience leading or managing a platform migration or cross-platform-to-native transition.
• Familiarity with AI-powered product interfaces — chat, voice, or LLM-integrated consumer experiences.
• Experience building or scaling web application services alongside a mobile product.
• Background in consumer hardware + software products (connected devices, IoT, or similar).
• Experience with Microsoft MAUI, Xamarin, Flutter, React Native, or similar cross-platform frameworks — and a clear-eyed view of their tradeoffs.

In the first 90 days:

• You have a clear, honest assessment of the current app's quality, technical debt, and the team's capabilities.
• You have a point of view on the platform strategy question — with a plan to validate it and build alignment around it.
• Both the current app and the future app are running on clear tracks, with ownership, priorities, and risks visible.
• You have built strong working relationships with your key partners: Product, UX, QA, Cloud Engineering, and the Sr. Manager of Software Delivery & Operations.

In the first year:

• App store ratings have improved — customers are noticing and saying so.
• The platform strategy is decided, documented, and the team is executing against it with confidence.
• The new app POC is live in the hands of customers and being actively iterated on based on real usage data.
• Web services are live and meeting the quality bar of the mobile experience.
• The engineering team is operating at a higher standard — technically and culturally — than when you arrived.