Principal Android Developer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

About Arlo:
At Arlo, we're passionate about creating innovative and reliable solutions that help people protect what matters most to them. Our team is dedicated to delivering products that exceed our customers' expectations, while always pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the world of protection technology. We believe that everyone deserves to feel safe and secure, whether they're at home or away, and we're committed to providing our customers with the peace of mind they need to live their lives without worry. Arlo's deep expertise in AI- and CV-powered analytics, cloud services, user experience, product design, and innovative wireless and RF connectivity enables the delivery of a seamless, smart security experience for Arlo users that is easy to set up and interact with every day.

Arlo's Android app is how millions of people keep an eye on what they care about - homes, businesses, pets, and family. Behind a simple "tap to see live video" experience sits a demanding system: low-latency streaming, reliable security notifications, device provisioning over flaky networks, and strict privacy and battery constraints.
We're looking for a Principal Android Engineer to set the technical direction for the Arlo Android app and the team that builds it. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll spend real time in the codebase - designing, prototyping, reviewing, and shipping - while also raising the bar for architecture, quality, and engineering practice across the whole Android team.

What you'll do

• Own the architectural vision for the Android app and drive it from proposal to production - modularization, state management,
• navigation, networking, and the patterns the rest of the team builds on.
• Lead by example in the codebase: ship meaningful features and platform improvements yourself, and set the standard for what "good"
• looks like through your own pull requests.
• Tackle the hardest technical problems on the app - real-time video streaming, latency, reliability of security notifications, background
• execution, and battery/performance constraints.
• Drive large-scale refactors and migrations (e.g., to Jetpack Compose, to a cleaner module graph, to modern async patterns) with a
• pragmatic, incremental plan that keeps the app shippable throughout.
• Define and uphold engineering standards: testing strategy, code review culture, CI/CD, release health, crash-free rates, and performance
• budgets.
• Mentor and grow engineers across levels - through pairing, design reviews, RFCs, and day-to-day technical guidance.
• Partner closely with product, design, backend/firmware, and QA to shape what's feasible and sequence work sensibly across teams.
• Make build-vs-buy and technology-selection decisions, and document the reasoning so the team can move fast with confidence.
• Champion observability and debuggability - logging, tracing, crash and ANR triage, and the tooling that makes production issues findable.

Core skills we expect at this level

Android & Kotlin depth

• Expert-level Kotlin, including coroutines and Flow for structured concurrency and reactive state.
• Deep knowledge of the Android framework and platform internals: the activity/fragment and component lifecycles, process death and
• state restoration, the threading model, and how the system schedules and kills work.
• Strong command of Jetpack libraries (Compose, ViewModel, Navigation, Room, WorkManager, DataStore, Media3/ExoPlayer).
• Modern app architecture in practice - unidirectional data flow (MVVM/MVI), clean separation of concerns, and well-defined module
• boundaries - with the judgment to know when to bend the rules.

Architecture & scale

• Proven experience designing and evolving a large, multi-module Android codebase, including Gradle build configuration and build-time
• optimization.
• Dependency injection at scale (Hilt/Dagger) and the trade-offs involved.
• A track record of leading migrations and refactors in a live, high-traffic app without halting feature delivery.

Quality & delivery

• A real testing strategy across unit, integration, and UI layers (JUnit, Turbine, Compose testing, Espresso/UI Automator), and the discipline
• to make tests a help rather than a burden.
• Hands-on with CI/CD for mobile (build pipelines, automated checks, staged/phased rollouts, feature flags).
• Performance engineering: profiling and fixing jank, memory leaks, slow cold starts, and excessive wakeups/battery drain using tools like
• the Android Studio profilers, Perfetto/systrace, Baseline Profiles, and Macrobenchmark.

Leadership in practice

• The ability to influence without authority - aligning engineers around a direction through clear writing, strong design reviews, and
• credible code.
• Excellent technical communication: you can make a complex trade-off legible to both a junior engineer and a VP.
• A mentoring instinct and genuine investment in growing the people around you.

AI leadership
AI coding tools are changing how Android teams work, and we want a Principal who treats that as an engineering responsibility rather than a
novelty. The goal is to make the team meaningfully faster and stronger - without letting AI-generated code erode architecture, readability, or long-term maintainability.

• Set the team's strategy for AI-assisted development - where AI tools genuinely accelerate work (boilerplate, test scaffolding, migrations,
• refactors, documentation, exploration) and where human judgment must stay in the loop.
• Define the guardrails that keep quality high: review standards for AI-generated code, architectural and security boundaries it must
• respect, and clear expectations that engineers understand and own every line they ship regardless of how it was produced.
• Build the practices and prompts/patterns that let the team get reliable results from AI tools, and codify them so the whole team benefits
• rather than each engineer reinventing them.
• Use AI to raise the floor and the ceiling - accelerating ramp-up for newer engineers while freeing senior engineers to focus on the hard
• design problems - and mentor the team on using these tools to grow their skills, not bypass them.
• Evaluate and pilot AI tooling pragmatically, measuring real impact on delivery speed and code health, and retiring what doesn't earn its
• place.
• Guard against the failure modes - subtle bugs, insecure patterns, architectural drift, and over-reliance - by ensuring AI output is always
• held to the same testing, review, and design bar as anything else.

Especially valuable for this role
Because Arlo is a connected-security product, the following experience is a strong differentiator:

• Real-time media & streaming - WebRTC, RTSP, or peer-to-peer video; low-latency live view; two-way audio; and media playback/seek
• for recorded events (Media3/ExoPlayer, codecs, adaptive bitrate).
• IoT / connected-device experience - device provisioning and onboarding flows over BLE and Wi-Fi, pairing, firmware-update UX, and
• handling the long tail of connectivity and state-sync edge cases.
• Reliable notifications - FCM/push at scale where a missed or delayed alert is a real problem, including notification channels, priority,
• and the realities of OEM background restrictions and Doze/App Standby.
• Background & foreground services - long-running and time-sensitive work under modern Android background-execution limits, with
• careful attention to battery.
• Security & privacy on-device - encryption, secure credential and token storage (Keystore, EncryptedSharedPreferences/DataStore),
• biometric auth, and certificate handling.
• Networking robustness - designing for offline-first behavior, retries, backoff, and graceful degradation on poor connections.
• Resilience across the device matrix - handling fragmentation across OEMs, OS versions, and screen sizes, including aggressive
• battery managers on certain manufacturers.

Nice to have

• Experience sharing logic or code across iOS and Android.
• Contributions to open source, public technical writing, or conference talks.
• Familiarity with the broader smart-home ecosystem (Matter, Google Home / Alexa integrations, widgets, Wear OS, or Android TV/largescreen
• surfaces).
• Backend or firmware fluency sufficient to collaborate deeply across the stack.

What success looks like in the first year

• The team has a clear, documented architecture that new engineers can ramp into quickly.
• Measurable improvements in app health - crash-free sessions, cold-start time, live-view latency, and notification reliability.
• A healthier, faster delivery pipeline and a code review culture people actually value.
• Engineers on the team visibly leveling up because of your mentorship and the standards you set.

The pay range for this position reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries at commencement of employment and is expected to be between USD$215,000-295,000/year.However, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including role, job-related knowledge, skills, relevant education and experience.The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including bonus, equity, and a full range of benefits. Details of all benefits will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

We're committed to inclusivity and selecting the strongest candidate-no matter their background. Even if you don't meet every listed qualification, we encourage you to apply. We're happy to support growth in areas essential to the role. Interested in learning more about our workplace? Visit and follow our LinkedIn, and Glassdoor pages to read employee insights and get updates of what it's like to be part of Arlo.

Arlo is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value inclusion and are committed to inclusive, and harassment-free workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment based on all legally protected statuses in all hiring and employment.

We provide reasonable accommodations to applicants and employees with disabilities, who are pregnant or have a related medical condition, or who have sincerely held religious beliefs, observances, and practices. Pursuant to applicable state and municipal Fair Chance Laws and Ordinances, the Company will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.