Lead Middleware Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Director, Mobile & Platform Engineering

Department: Technology

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Los Angeles HQ

Compensation: $200,000 - $250,000 / year

Description

SKIMS is a solutions-oriented brand creating the next generation of underwear, loungewear, shapewear, and essentials. We are setting new standards by delivering technically innovative, comfort-driven products with elevated design for everybody.

At the intersection of culture, innovation, and commerce, SKIMS is a global brand redefining modern apparel. Our teams are built on creativity, collaboration, and operational excellence, and we are committed to fostering an inclusive, high-performance environment where ambitious, curious, and values-driven individuals can do the best work of their careers.

As we continue to scale globally, our HQ teams play a critical role in shaping strategy, building world-class infrastructure, and driving sustainable growth across markets.

We’re looking for a hands‑on, highly collaborative Director of Mobile & Middleware Engineering to lead two critical areas of our commerce technology stack: our cloud‑based middleware platform and our native mobile application.

Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, this leader will own the technical strategy, health, scalability, and delivery of our AWS-based middleware ecosystem while also overseeing the engineering team responsible for our Flutter mobile application.

The ideal candidate is comfortable operating at both the strategic and tactical levels. You should be able to set technical direction, develop strong engineering teams, partner closely with Product, Design, and other cross‑functional leaders, and quickly step into complex technical situations when needed.

This role is particularly important in ensuring our platforms remain stable, resilient, and performant during high‑traffic moments, including major product launches, sales, and other peak commerce events.

Key Responsibilities Middleware & Platform Engineering

• Own the architecture, technical strategy, operational health, and ongoing evolution of our AWS-based middleware platform.
• Provide technical leadership across services built primarily with TypeScript and Node.js.
• Oversee deployment and infrastructure patterns using Serverless, ensuring services are repeatable, secure, scalable, and easy to operate.
• Ensure middleware services are highly available, observable, resilient, and capable of supporting significant traffic spikes during major launches, promotions, and other high-volume commerce events.
• Drive performance testing, capacity planning, caching strategies, failure recovery, and proactive remediation of scalability risks.
• Establish strong engineering standards around API design, asynchronous processing, data access, fault tolerance, retries, graceful degradation, and service reliability.
• Own integrations with the Shopify Storefront and Admin APIs, ensuring API usage is reliable, efficient, secure, and designed with platform limits and rate constraints in mind.
• Oversee CMS integrations with Sanity, including content modeling, validation, and efficient data retrieval using GROQ queries.
• Promote strong schema validation and data integrity practices using Zod across service boundaries, external integrations, and internal APIs.
• Establish and maintain automated testing standards using Jest and ts-jest, with a focus on meaningful unit, integration, and regression coverage.
• Drive strong observability and incident response practices using Sentry, including error monitoring, alerting, root‑cause analysis, and long‑term remediation.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Security, Product, Web, Mobile, QA, and Data teams to deliver dependable end‑to‑end commerce experiences.
• Maintain a high‑quality, stable, and well‑documented codebase while balancing technical debt reduction, architectural improvements, and the need to move quickly.
• Ensure teams can respond decisively to production issues, communicate clearly during incidents, and turn operational learnings into lasting platform improvements.
• Evaluate and evolve the technology stack as business needs change, while maintaining pragmatic standards for reliability, maintainability, security, and cost.

Mobile Engineering

• Provide engineering leadership and oversight for our mobile application built in Flutter and Dart.
• Partner with Mobile Engineering leaders and individual contributors to establish technical direction, architecture, and engineering standards.
• Ensure the mobile platform remains performant, scalable, maintainable, and reliable.
• Own strong release management practices, including versioning, build readiness, phased rollouts, and publishing app releases through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
• Oversee app‑store submissions, review processes, release approvals, forced‑update strategies, and production monitoring following each release.
• Drive strong observability, automated testing, incident response, and production stability practices across the mobile platform.
• Work closely with Product and Design to translate customer experiences into scalable technical solutions.
• Experience with native mobile development is a strong plus, including iOS development with Swift or Objective‑C and Android development with Kotlin or Java.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop engineers and engineering leaders across Middleware and Mobile.
• Create clear ownership and accountability while empowering teams to make strong technical decisions.
• Build a culture focused on quality, urgency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Establish engineering standards around architecture, code quality, testing, observability, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Ensure teams can respond quickly and effectively when production issues or business‑critical situations arise.
• Balance speed and execution with long‑term platform health and technical sustainability.
• Identify technical risks early and proactively drive remediation.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Product, Design, QA, Web Engineering, Data, Infrastructure, and other cross‑functional teams.
• Participate in product and technical planning, helping teams understand complexity, dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs.
• Communicate technical topics clearly to both engineering and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Help shape roadmaps by bringing an engineering perspective to product strategy and business priorities.
• Build strong relationships across teams and operate with a team‑first mindset.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise What We’re Looking For

• Significant engineering leadership experience managing high-performing software engineering teams.
• Strong hands‑on technical background in modern backend and distributed systems.
• Deep experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong experience with TypeScript, Node.js, APIs, and service-oriented architectures.
• Experience designing and scaling systems that support significant traffic and transaction volumes.
• Demonstrated experience preparing platforms for high‑traffic events, peak demand, or rapid traffic spikes.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, monitoring, caching, performance optimization, incident response, and fault‑tolerant architecture.
• Experience maintaining and modernizing large production codebases while continuing to deliver new capabilities.
• Experience leading mobile engineering teams or working closely with native mobile platforms.
• Familiarity with Flutter/Dart is strongly preferred.
• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to make pragmatic technical decisions quickly.
• Experience working closely with Product and Design organizations in a fast‑moving environment.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and leadership skills.

What Success Looks Like

• You will be successful in this role when:
• Our Middleware and Mobile platforms remain stable and performant through peak traffic and major business events.
• Engineering teams have clear technical direction, ownership, and accountability.
• Production issues are identified quickly, resolved effectively, and translated into meaningful long‑term improvements.
• Middleware architecture continues to scale alongside the growth of the business.
• Mobile engineering maintains strong release quality, performance, and customer experience.
• Product, Design, and Engineering operate as close partners rather than independent functions.
• Teams are able to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, maintainability, or engineering quality.

Leadership Profile

We’re looking for someone who is technically credible, calm under pressure, action-oriented, and highly collaborative.

This person should be comfortable diving deep when necessary while also giving their teams the autonomy and support needed to succeed. They should naturally bring people together, communicate clearly, challenge assumptions constructively, and take ownership when problems arise.

Above all, this leader should care deeply about building great teams and dependable technology that can scale with the business.

Benefits, Culture and Perks Benefits and Culture

• Up to 100% Company Paid Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
• Kind Body Fertility Benefits
• 401(k) savings plan with up to 4% match
• Unlimited PTO
• Full Access to LinkedIn learning
• Employee Discounts

Perks (HQ Location)

• Free weekly catered lunch at HQ – M/T/W/Th
• Dog-Friendly office on a Thursday and Friday
• Free Swag Giveaways
• Annual Holiday Party
• Annual Summer Party
• Invitations to pop‑ups and other company events
• Complimentary daily office snacks and beverages