Staff Software Engineer - Mobile (iOS) - Sentera

As a Staff Software Engineer at John Deere - Sentera, you will be the technical lead and sole developer of FieldAgent Mobile, an iOS application for drone flight planning and execution in agriculture. You will also lead the design and development of new mobile applications for configuring Sentera sensors and cameras. You will work within an empowered product team, contributing to discovery, design, testing, delivery, and maintenance of software solutions. The role involves customer collaboration, defining mobile architecture, mentoring, and ensuring software quality.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical lead and sole developer of FieldAgent Mobile, an iOS application used by drone pilots to plan and execute drone flights to scout agricultural fields. You will also lead design and development of one or more new mobile applications enabling customers to configure and run Sentera sensors/cameras and related hardware products. The current technical lead is moving into a new role at Sentera. While they will be available long term for knowledge transfer and consultation, you will own the existing and new applications.
• Drive impact as part of an empowered product team composed of Product Management, UX, and Engineering implementing the Product Operating Model. You will contribute to every stage of product development: discovering, designing, testing, delivering, and maintaining innovative software solutions to advance scouting through drone flights and field walks for John Deere’s customers.
• Collaborate with Product Management and UX to develop a deep understanding of customer problems including participation in customer calls and in-person customer visits, including both internal customers (Sentera’s own pilots) and external customers.
• Combine your technical expertise and creativity to propose solutions, develop prototypes, test prototypes with customers, and evaluate feasibility.
• Following validation of customer value, technical feasibility, usability, and business viability (the discovery phase), design, code, test, deliver, and maintain software as part of a team passionate about software quality (the delivery phase).
• Define and drive mobile software architecture and design patterns.
• Perform developer testing of your software by flying drones.
• Support a culture of software craftsmanship best practices including testing, Continuous Integration/Deployment, peer code review, automation, and technical debt management.
• Leverage AI tools such as Copilot (VS Code or CLI) thoughtfully to balance productivity with architecture quality, code readability, and project maintainability.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to others within the technical discipline.
• Serve as a technical advisor in the solution of complex problems spanning the cloud backend team, other client app teams, and the embedded/hardware team.
• Identify and resolve performance, reliability, and scalability issues.
• Contribute to long-term mobile platform strategy and technical roadmap.
• If you have experience in C# .NET, collaborate on high level design and provide peer code review for the tech lead and sole developer of Sentera’s Windows application.
• Travel to participate in 2-5 customer visits per year for discovery and 1-2 internal conferences/trainings per year. Travel includes day trips and overnight trips lasting 1-2 nights.

Requirements

• 6 or more years of professional software development experience
• 2 or more years of hands-on iOS development experience
• Strong proficiency in all of the following:
• Swift
• UIKit
• SwiftUI
• Swift Actors
• NSURLSession for modern REST and/or GQL integration
• Experience with:
• Unit/integration testing frameworks
• Demonstrated critical thinking, problem solving, debugging, and analytical skills.
• Ability to work effectively in cross-functional engineering teams
• Passion for working with customers to understand and solve their problems.
• Ability and enthusiasm to work independently as the technical lead and sole developer on a mobile software application while collaborating with engineers responsible for the back end and adjacent client applications (web and PC).
• Skilled in written and verbal interpersonal communications, open-minded listening, balanced assertiveness, conflict resolution, and tact.

Nice to have

• Cross-platform frameworks such as React Native or Flutter
• Swift NIO
• CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions
• Geospatial data processing and visualization: presenting geographically-located data on a map, basemaps, vector data, raster data, GeoJSON, ESRI Shapefiles, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFS (COGs), rasterio, or geopandas.
• Drone flight applications
• Integrating with hardware, sensors, or IoT devices
• Precision agriculture and digital agronomy
• C# .NET and/or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Android development
• Embracing the Product Operating Model with an emphasis on spending time talking to customers to understand their problems during the discovery process.
• Using a Generative AI tool such as Copilot as a software development productivity tool.

Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements
• Highly competitive base pay
• Savings & Retirement benefits (401K and Defined Contribution)
• Healthcare benefits with a generous company contribution in the Health Savings Account
• Adoption assistance
• Employee Assistance Programs
• Tuition assistance
• Fitness subsidies and on-site gyms at specific Deere locations
• Charitable contribution match
• Employee Purchase Plan & numerous discount programs for personal use
• Vacation and Holiday Pay