Senior Android Engineer - AI Platform

Senior Android Engineer - AI Platform

About the Role

Yo is building an AI inference platform that runs directly on smartphones - turning the phone in your pocket into part of a global AI network. You will own the Android side: building the runtime that uses Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, and Google NPUs to run real AI models on real devices while the phone sits on the charger.

This is a foundational hire. You set the Android technical direction from day one and ship code that runs on millions of devices, across the full spread of OEMs and chipsets.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own the Android SDK end-to-end - architecture, public API, distribution, versioning
- Build and maintain the Android runtime that runs AI inference across the major NPU vendors
- Handle the long tail of Android hardware fragmentation - flagship to mid-range
- Make it fast, battery-friendly, and thermally well-behaved at sustained load
- Manage the lifecycle correctly within Android foreground-service and battery-optimisation rules
- Work with the iOS engineer to keep the two platforms feature-aligned
- Ship to production and iterate against real-world telemetry

## Required Qualifications

- 6+ years Android engineering experience
- Strong Kotlin and Java; comfortable with C++ and JNI / NDK
- Deep understanding of Android lifecycle, foreground services, Doze mode, and Play Store policies
- Experience with system-level constraints: battery, thermal, memory pressure
- Has shipped production code across a wide range of OEMs and chipsets

## Nice to Have

- On-device ML experience (TensorFlow Lite, ExecuTorch, ONNX Runtime, llama.cpp on Android)
- NPU SDK experience: Qualcomm QNN, MediaTek NeuroPilot, Samsung ENN, Google AICore
- Quantised model formats (INT4 / INT8, GGUF)
- Has shipped a public SDK or library used by other developers
- Cryptography fundamentals - end-to-end encryption, attestation, hardware-backed keystore
- Open-source contributions to ML inference projects

## What Success Looks Like (First 6 Months)

- Working Android SDK shipped to a pilot user base
- Production telemetry showing measured battery and thermal impact
- Stable runtime across flagship, mid-range, and entry-level devices
- Clean foundation for the team to build on

## Location & Logistics

- Remote / flexible (team in EU and US time zones)
- Competitive senior compensation, equity participation
- Reports to the CTO