Staff Software Engineer – Android Mobile Application Development

Major Purpose: We are seeking a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and maintenance of mobile applications used by drone pilots to plan and execute drone flights for scouting agricultural fields. This role will support Sentera / John Deere and focus primarily on developing a new Android mobile application while maintaining the existing iOS application, FieldAgent Mobile. The ideal candidate will be a hands-on technical leader capable of working independently, driving mobile architecture decisions, and adopting innovative AI-driven software development practices to improve productivity, quality, and maintainability.

AI-Driven Software Development: Explore, adopt, and implement emerging AI-driven software development processes and tools. Rethink traditional software development workflows to accelerate delivery while maintaining high-quality architecture and maintainable source code. Identify opportunities to leverage AI across discovery, design, development, testing, and maintenance.

Product Discovery and Delivery: Collaborate with Product Management, UX, and Engineering within an empowered product team operating under the Product Operating Model. Participate in customer calls and in-person visits to understand the challenges faced by internal and external customers. Propose solutions, develop prototypes, validate concepts with customers, and evaluate technical feasibility and usability. Translate validated customer needs into software solutions through design, coding, testing, delivery, and maintenance. Contribute to continuous improvement in product quality and customer experience.

Technical Leadership and Collaboration: Serve as a technical advisor for complex problems involving cloud backend systems, other client applications, and embedded hardware. Collaborate with backend, web, PC, and hardware engineering teams to ensure seamless integration. Identify and resolve application performance, reliability, and scalability issues. Contribute to the long-term mobile platform strategy and technical roadmap. Provide high-level design guidance and peer code reviews for the Windows application if experienced in C# .NET.Perform drone flights to test and validate software functionality in real-world conditions.

Travel Requirements: Travel approximately 2–5 times per year for customer discovery visits. Attend approximately 1–2 internal conferences or training sessions annually. Travel may include day trips and overnight stays of 1–2 nights. Required Skills and Qualifications 6+ years of professional software development experience.2+ years of hands-on Android application development experience. Strong understanding of mobile application architecture, design patterns, and software engineering best practices. Demonstrated ability to adopt and implement innovative AI-driven software development processes. Commitment to building high-quality, reliable, scalable, and maintainable software. Strong critical thinking, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and troubleshooting skills. Ability to work independently as the technical lead and sole developer of a mobile application. Experience collaborating with engineers responsible for backend services and adjacent web, PC, or client applications. Strong customer focus and the ability to understand business needs and translate them into technical solutions. Excellent written and verbal communication, active listening, conflict resolution, and interpersonal skills. Ability to balance technical leadership, independent decision-making, and cross-functional collaboration.

Preferred Qualifications: Experience in one or more of the following areas is highly desirable: Technical project leadership as a sole developer or team technical lead.iOS application development and maintenance. CI/CD pipelines and automation tools, such as GitHub Actions. Geospatial data processing and visualization, including map-based data presentation, basemaps, vector and raster data, GeoJSON, ESRI Shapefiles, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), Rasterio, and GeoPandas. Drone flight applications and flight-planning software. Hardware integration, sensors, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Precision agriculture and digital agronomy. C# .NET development and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).Customer-centric product development and the Product Operating Model, particularly customer discovery and validation. Experience defining mobile application architecture and long-term technical roadmaps.

Education: Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field. Equivalent professional experience in a related career field may be considered.

Ideal Candidate Profile: The ideal candidate is a hands-on Android engineer with strong technical leadership skills who can independently own a mobile application from architecture through delivery and maintenance. They should be comfortable maintaining an existing iOS application, collaborating across engineering teams, engaging directly with customers, and embracing AI-driven software development approaches to deliver innovative solutions for agricultural drone operations.