Mobile Engineer - Platform (Junior)
littlefish
Sterling, VA, USA · Remote
Posted on May 11, 2026
About littlefish
littlefish is a Unified Commerce Platform for small and medium businesses across Africa, distributed through Financial Institution partners — banks, telcos, and insurers. We are live with 3 of the 5 major South African banks and onboarding 10–12 FI clients across the continent. The platform gives SMEs access to payments, invoicing, stock management, and expense management — tools previously only available to large corporations.
We are an AI-native engineering team. Every engineer operates as an Intent Architect: directing AI with precision, owning every decision about correctness, security, and quality, and building software that impacts real businesses across Africa. We are not vibe coders. The AI accelerates execution. The engineering judgment is yours.
Role Summary
The Junior Mobile Engineer is the entry point into the Platform Engineering track for mobile. You will work on real production code in Flutter / Dart across the littlefish merchant companion app and POS terminal app — under the direction of senior Mobile Engineers and the Principal Architect.
The expectation is not that you arrive as a fully-formed Intent Architect. It is that you arrive hungry to become one. You will be given real ownership early, paired with the engineers who set the standard, and held to the same quality bar everyone else ships against. AI tooling is core to how we work; learning to direct it well is part of the job, not an optional extra.
Key Responsibilities
Building and Shipping
Build features under guidance in Flutter / Dart for the merchant and POS apps — most often a defined slice of a larger feature owned by a senior engineer.
Use AI tooling actively — directing it with intent, reviewing its output critically, and being able to explain the code you submit, line by line, regardless of who or what generated it.
Implement UI against design specs with attention to layout, state, and accessibility across Android and iOS.
Write widget and unit tests, and learn to identify the failure modes that matter on mobile — bad networks, app backgrounding, low-memory devices, hardware variation.
Submit clean, reviewable pull requests.
Solution Design Participation
Participate in technical design discussions — ask questions, surface assumptions, learn how senior engineers decompose mobile problems before they prompt.
Contribute to design artefacts (state models, navigation flows, API contracts) under senior guidance.
Begin developing the architectural instinct that defines an Intent Architect — thinking about state, lifecycle, failure modes, and platform differences before writing or generating code.
Code Review and Learning
Have your work reviewed substantively, and act on the feedback — review is the primary mechanism through which you grow into the role.
Begin reviewing peer pull requests once you have the context.
Take ownership of the gaps in your knowledge — Flutter internals, native platform behaviour, fintech domain concepts, AI tooling fluency.
Platform and Domain Awareness
Build a working understanding of how the apps integrate with backend services, auth flows, and FI-specific configuration.
Develop awareness of mobile security in a fintech context: why secure storage, auth on device, and careful handling of payment flows matter.
Develop familiarity with the Android and iOS release pipelines — signing, provisioning, store submission — under guidance.
Ask questions about the FI partner context, the SME use case, and the merchant or cashier journey — curiosity about the business is part of the job from day one.
Collaboration and Delivery
Work in cross-functional squads alongside Product, Design, QA, and senior Mobile Engineers.
Participate in agile ceremonies and be visible about what you are working on, where you are stuck, and what you have learned.
Contribute to internal documentation as you build context — junior engineers often see clearly what senior engineers have stopped noticing.
Skills and Qualifications
Experience
0–3 years of professional software development experience, or a strong recent graduate / bootcamp / self-taught equivalent with a demonstrable portfolio.
Working proficiency in Flutter and Dart — you have built and shipped (or substantially completed) at least one real Flutter app.
Working familiarity with Android or iOS as a platform — you can navigate Android Studio / Xcode, run a build, and debug on a real device.
Comfortable with Git, pull request workflow, and basic CI/CD concepts.
Practical exposure to consuming REST APIs, async data flows, and JSON.
Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) and able to articulate what you have learned about using them well.
Fintech or POS exposure is a plus, not required.
Technical Skills
Mobile core: Flutter, Dart, widget composition, navigation, lifecycle awareness.
State management: working understanding of at least one approach (Riverpod, Bloc, or Provider).
Native platforms: basic familiarity with Android (Kotlin) or iOS (Swift) — enough to read platform code and debug at the boundary. Both is a bonus.
Data & APIs: REST, JSON, async/await, basic local persistence (shared_preferences, sqflite, Hive, or similar).
Tooling: Git, Android Studio / Xcode / VS Code, Flutter DevTools.
AI tooling: practical familiarity with AI-assisted development, and self-awareness about its limits — you can describe a time it produced something that looked right but was wrong, and what you did about it.
Disposition and Behaviours
Curious — about the code, the device, and the merchant using the app.
Accountable — you own everything you ship, including what AI generated.
Coachable — you take feedback as input, apply it, come back better.
Honest about uncertainty — you say "I don't know yet," then go find out.
Aware of the weight of the work — when the POS is down, a merchant cannot trade.
Hungry to grow into an Intent Architect — you understand the bar is high and want to be held to it.
To apply, please send your CV and a short note on why littlefish to hiring@littlefishapp.com. We do not require cover letters, but we do want to know what draws you to this role specifically — curiosity about the problem is part of what we are hiring for.
