Engineering Manager (Mobile)

Who we are

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country. 

We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert to name just a few.

Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. 

Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today.

About the role and team:

As a Mobile Engineering Manager at CreateFuture you lead a small, highly autonomous mobile team embedded with one of our clients, building consumer mobile products across iOS and Android. This is a hands-on leadership role: depending on the situation it spans mobile architecture and technical direction, leading delivery, growing your engineers, and being the person the client works with day to day. You line manage the engineers on your team and are accountable for how the team performs, delivers and grows.

You are deeply product-focused. You understand the product, its users and the client's business, and you point the team at the work that creates the most value rather than just the work in front of you. The defining quality of the role is that you make your team drive, not be driven: you own the outcome, get ahead of the work, make sure the right work reaches the right people and actually ships, and create the space for engineers to take real ownership. You take risks, move fast, own it, and if something goes wrong you fix it.

This is a role for someone who thrives on independence and ambiguity. You will often be working ahead of your leadership's day (across timezones), so you work autonomously, write everything down, surface blockers and decisions asynchronously, and drive questions to resolution yourself rather than waiting to be told. You keep momentum without needing constant real-time contact.

You lead best-in-class AI-assisted delivery, not generic AI use. You continually improve how the team works with AI: building and refining reusable skills and agents, working in feedback loops rather than one-shot prompting, and driving spec-driven development where clear specifications and guidelines steer the AI. Humans stay accountable for quality; the bar keeps rising.

You provide actionable feedback, technical guidance, mentoring and support, and you foster continuous improvement, growth and consultancy mindsets. The role represents CreateFuture as the engagement leader for the team, working with the client to understand their problems, manage expectations and drive business value forward.

What you'll be doing:

Technical Leadership

Direction: sets the technical direction across iOS and Android, making informed decisions on architecture, patterns and tooling, and staying close enough to the code to make the call and to coach well.

Hands-On: where appropriate, works in the codebase alongside the team, using hands-on time deliberately, including to coach and model good practice, rather than to be the hero.

AI-Assisted Delivery: drives best-in-class AI-assisted delivery. Builds and improves reusable skills and agents, uses feedback loops so output gets better over time, and champions spec-driven development. Keeps humans accountable for every change and refuses to settle for generic AI use.

Quality: sets and monitors appropriate standards, takes part in code reviews, and keeps the mobile codebases healthy and maintainable, favouring reversible, safely-releasable delivery.

Learning: stays abreast of emerging mobile and AI tooling and evaluates its applicability.

Problem-Solving: troubleshoots complex issues, finds root causes, and fixes them.

Team & People Leadership

Culture: fosters a collaborative, ownership-taking, psychologically-safe environment where people take risks, move fast, own their work, and fix things when they break. 

Drive, not driven: grows engineers to own their work and make the call rather than waiting to be told, and steps back deliberately to create the space for them to lead.

Autonomy: sets the team up to run independently, self-review, and keep moving without constant direction, especially across timezones.

AI Uplift: raises the whole team's standard of AI usage, spreading good skills, agents and spec-driven practice rather than letting each person reinvent generic prompting.

Mentoring & Coaching: provides technical guidance, mentoring and support, developing people to a consistent, high standard.

Performance & Line Management: observes performance, gives concrete and actionable feedback, recognises achievements, and adheres to CreateFuture's line management accountabilities.

Client, Product & Delivery

Product-Obsessed: understands the client's product, users and business, drives the work that creates the most value, and spots new opportunities to enable the client and CreateFuture.

Right Work, Right People, Shipped: makes sure the right work reaches the right people and actually gets delivered, unblocking and routing rather than running ceremony.

Owns the Outcome: owns and communicates the delivery signal for the team so status, risk and the decisions needed are always clear, and escalates cleanly (issue, options, recommendation, deadline).

Readiness: gets ahead of the next work, shaping scope and approach with the client before delivery begins, so the team leads the work rather than inheriting it under pressure.

Async, Cross-Timezone Working: keeps a fast-moving, well-documented, asynchronous working rhythm so progress continues and blockers are visible even when the client is offline.

Straight Talk on Delivery: gives the client an honest read on what is realistic, and pushes back with evidence when an ask is not.

We'd love to talk to you if:

• You're an experienced engineering manager or senior mobile lead who has kept their technical edge while developing team leadership, delivery leadership and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong mobile background: iOS with Swift as the primary language, plus Android. Kotlin Multiplatform is a bonus, not a requirement.
• Deeply product-focused: understands the product and its users and drives the work that creates the most value.
• Makes teams drive, not be driven: owns the outcome, gets ahead of the work, spots risk early, communicates before being chased, and makes sure ownership never disappears.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and genuine independence: comfortable owning a problem end to end and bringing structure to a loosely defined brief.
• Excellent asynchronous, written communication: documents decisions, keeps blockers visible, and keeps momentum without constant real-time contact. A driver, not an order-taker: asks probing questions but resolves them, and grows engineers to do the same.
• Gets the right work to the right people and makes sure it ships. Outcomes over ceremony, using whatever lightweight ways of working fit, rather than being wedded to a methodology. Takes risks and moves fast, owns the result, and fixes it when something goes wrong. Continually raises the bar on AI-assisted delivery: builds and improves skills and agents, works in feedback loops, and drives spec-driven development, aiming for best-in-class AI usage rather than generic tool use.
• Comfortable working across multiple codebases and in a self-sufficient team that reviews its own code.
• Experienced as a line manager, balancing that with leading the team's delivery. Builds strong client relationships, understands their problems, and gives them workable solutions.
• Experienced as a mentor and coach to engineers.
• Comfortable having difficult conversations, and giving and receiving concrete, actionable feedback.
• Experienced in contributing to and shaping recruitment.
• Brings continuous improvement, growth and consultancy mindsets, and is passionate about mobile engineering and the wider technical community.

What we'll offer you:

At CreateFuture, we challenge ourselves to go beyond the obvious and we care deeply about our craft and customers. With us, you’ll have ambitious projects to sink your teeth into and plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. You’ll be part of our safe, supportive and friendly culture - that looks after you - and join our team of genuinely great people. 

Our benefits include:

• Total 35 days holiday (we have flexible bank holidays)
• Comprehensive private medical insurance
• Enhanced parental and adoption leave
• Pension - matched up to 5%

View our complete list of benefits here.

As this is a hybrid role, we’re looking for people within a commuting distance of our Edinburgh office and who are flexible to travel to client sites and CreateFuture UK regional offices. We are very flexible and trust you to manage your own schedule to balance face-to-face time with clients, colleagues and working from home.

We create and reinforce a culture that rewards employees’ impact, not just activity. We trust our employees to work autonomously and promote ownership across all levels.

Next steps:

Our Talent team aims to respond to all applications within a reasonable timeframe, regardless of whether or not we progress your application.

Our interview process:

1. 30-minute call with one of our Talent Acquisition Team.
2. 90-minute Technical Consultancy Interview.
3. 60-minute People Leadership & Values interview.

Our interview process is designed as an opportunity both for our interviewers to learn about your expertise, interests and motivations and for you to gain insights into the role, team and business as a whole, so throughout the process, you’ll meet a few people from our team as well as others from across the business to help you get a well-rounded view of the role and life at CreateFuture.

We believe that representative teams made up of people with different backgrounds, skills, and points of view help us build the best workplace possible, and enable us to create genuinely innovative, broadly useful products.