Senior React Native Engineer for Vertical Streaming platform

Job Description

Role Overview:
 

The Senior Full-Stack Developer position at Vertical Television involves acting as a technical pillar and the ultimate “go-to” person within the app development team. The role demands a highly independent professional with a strong frontend orientation, responsible for driving the architecture of a high-scale mobile app and operational web platforms. The developer will contribute to building the future of Vertical Television by combining cinematic storytelling with interactive, vertical-first technology, focusing on scalable application design and performance optimization.

Key Responsibilities:

• System & App Architecture: Architect, plan, and lead the development of the mobile app built with React Native and web platforms using React, ensuring a holistic and scalable system design.
• Vertical Video Feed & Playback: Own the core viewing experience featuring an infinite vertical video feed with instant time-to-first-frame, video preload/prefetch, player-instance recycling, and disciplined memory management across multiple concurrent video players.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as the technical expert and mentor for mid-level developers by providing guidance, conducting code reviews, and elevating engineering standards within the team.
• Standards & Reusability: adherence to coding standards, best practices, and promote a reusability-first mindset to maintain a clean, maintainable, and highly scalable codebase.
• Deep App Performance: Address complex performance challenges including app state management, native bridging, and video rendering optimizations such as player tuning, reducing frame drops, minimizing jank on scroll, and improving cold-start times.
• Monetization: Design and integrate in-app purchases, subscriptions, deep links, attribution, and user-behavior tracking end-to-end, including client SDK implementation and server-side receipt validation.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product, Design, and Backend engineering teams to deliver fast iterations of complex features in a dynamic startup environment.

Additional Expertise and Advantages:

• Experience with mobile CI/CD and release operations one of EAS, Fastlane, store submission, OTA updates (CodePush, EAS Update), and end-to-end testing.
• Background in high-growth startups or mobile entertainment products, with familiarity in vertical/short-form feed products similar to TikTok, Reels, or Shorts.
• Understanding of ad-tech and SSAI (AdMob, Google IMA) and subscription monetization modeling.
• Knowledge of DRM technologies (Widevine, FairPlay), offline downloads, and transcoding pipelines (Mux, AWS MediaConvert, AWS IVS) as beneficial skills.

Ideal Candidate Profile includes experience in the following areas: 

Streaming & vertical feed (the differentiator):

• Protocols/players shipped: HLS, LL-HLS (low-latency is the point for "TV"), DASH; react-native-video, Bitmovin, JW Player, ExoPlayer/AVPlayer, Mux, Video.js (web side).
• Vertical-feed mechanics: preload/prefetch strategy, player-instance pooling/recycling, FlashList/recycler usage, memory profiling, time-to-first-frame optimization.
• DRM (Widevine/FairPlay), ABR tuning, thumbnails/scrubbing, offline/download, CDN (CloudFront/Cloudflare/Fastly), transcoding (Mux/AWS MediaConvert/IVS).

RN architecture & performance:

• New Architecture (Fabric, TurboModules, JSI), Hermes; bare RN/CLI vs Expo (and EAS) — get their stance and why.
• Native modules written themselves (Swift/Kotlin/ObjC) — ask for a concrete bridge they built.
• State at scale (Redux Toolkit / Zustand / Jotai), Reanimated + Gesture Handler for the scroll/gesture layer, list virtualization (FlashList).

Monetization & growth plumbing:

• IAP/subscriptions: StoreKit 2, Google Play Billing, RevenueCat, server-side receipt validation.
• Ad-tech if relevant: AdMob, Google IMA, SSAI.
• Deep links/attribution: Branch, AppsFlyer/Adjust, Universal/App Links.

Analytics, quality, release:

• Product analytics: Amplitude/Mixpanel/Firebase; crash/perf: Sentry + Crashlytics, Firebase Performance.
• Testing: Jest, RN Testing Library, Detox or Maestro E2E; mobile CI/CD: EAS / Fastlane; store release management, OTA (CodePush/EAS Update).
• Auth: Cognito/Firebase Auth/Auth0, OAuth (Apple/Google), federated + biometric.

Backend/infra (scope it as secondary if FE-led):

• Node/NestJS or similar; MongoDB/Firebase as named; WebSockets/real-time for comments/live; AWS or GCP IaC (Terraform).