Flutter Developer (Intermediate to Senior)

The app has to work in a field, on one bar of signal, with sixty thousand people around it.

Howler builds the technology behind live experience — ticketing, access control and cashless payments in one system, trusted across more than 20 countries and used by some of South Africa's biggest events: Ultra South Africa, Comic Con Africa, Black Coffee Weekender, MTN Bushfire. The mobile app is where most people meet all of it: buying the ticket, getting through the gate, paying at the bar.

We are hiring a Flutter developer, intermediate or senior, to build and improve that app. You will turn ideas into working software quickly and stay accountable for your changes from implementation through release — not through to "pull request opened".

Be clear on one thing before you apply: we are looking for software engineering accelerated by AI, not a replacement for engineering fundamentals. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.

Flutter and Dart, in practice: widgets, lifecycle, layouts, navigation, null safety, asynchronous programming and streams, and interfaces that survive contact with real screen sizes and device configurations.

Application architecture — UI, business logic and data kept apart, consistent state and dependency management, and the ability to explain a trade-off you made rather than the one a tutorial made.

API integration and mobile data — REST and GraphQL, authentication and session expiry, errors, timeouts, local persistence, secure storage, connectivity changes, duplicate requests and stale data.

Testing and debugging — useful unit, widget and integration tests; reproducing failures on devices or emulators; investigating crashes, rendering issues and performance regressions.

Builds and releases — Git, pull requests, CI/CD and environment configuration, with a working understanding of signing, test distribution and mobile release workflows.

A relevant qualification in Computer Science, Software Engineering or similar — or equivalent practical industry experience. We genuinely mean the "or", and no AI certificate is required.

Bonus: offline-first applications and synchronisation; payments, ticketing, point-of-sale or event technology; QR/barcode scanning, NFC/RFID or Bluetooth; native Kotlin/Swift platform integrations; mobile observability, push notifications or deep links; Flutter web; or working against Ruby on Rails services. These are additional strengths, not a checklist — nobody has worked with all of them.

Build things that hold up. Responsive, accessible interfaces and reusable Flutter components, wired to our APIs — with the loading, error, retry and offline states the product actually needs, not just the happy path.

Keep what works, working. Deliver new features without breaking existing ones, with attention to performance, usability, security and data integrity.

Ship in small pieces. Break work into testable increments, prototype the uncertain parts, get feedback early, then turn the approved version into maintainable production code.

Say it before it hurts. Identify dependencies, flag risks and communicate trade-offs before they affect delivery. Work pragmatically inside the architecture we have rather than adding complexity nobody asked for.

Own the defect. Write automated tests, take part in code reviews, and investigate faults through to resolution — thinking about device constraints, unreliable connectivity and failure modes, not only the path that works.

Go the whole way. Work with Product, Engineering and QA to clarify acceptance criteria and agree API behaviour, then support deployment, release verification and production diagnosis.