Senior android native engineer (kotlin) — speech, services, performance

Location : Remote (Spain) with in‐person meetups around Costa del Sol (Fuengirola) — this is required Employment : Contractor or Full‐Time (flexible) Compensation : Fair and market‐competitive We are a small, focused startup building a high‐performance mobile experience. We’re looking for a senior Android engineer who lives and breathes native Android and system‐level work — someone who can own long‐lived services, audio pipelines, and on‐device speech recognition with a strong focus on reliability and efficiency. You will lead the native Android layer that powers and integrates with our existing app. What you’ll do Own the architecture and implementation of a long‐running foreground service for continuous speech recognition and audio capture. Leverage Android’s Speech Recognizer APIs (and alternative engines when appropriate) with robust Recognition Listener handling, on‐device / offline models, partial results, punctuation, and engine / package selection. Engineer resilient lifecycle behavior across process death, Doze / App Standby, and OEM quirks : Proper process isolation, notification channels, and foreground Services Boot persistence and battery optimization considerations Design efficient audio recording with attention to latency, buffering, acoustic echo cancellation / noise suppression, and storage management. Implement robust IPC patterns (Binder / Messenger / Broadcast Receiver) for communication between the service and app. You might integrate with an existing Module bridge while keeping the native module self‐sufficient. Build adaptive recovery strategies : automatic restart / backoff, memory / CPU monitoring, and graceful degradation across devices. Maintain high performance : profiling, tune allocations, minimize wakeups, and reduce battery / memory footprint. Keep us current with Android platform changes (Android 13 / 14+ foreground service policies, microphone service types, notifications permission) and adopt relevant new APIs when they help reliability or efficiency. Must‐have experience 5+ years building Android apps / services in Kotlin or Java, with deep knowledge of the Android app and process lifecycle. Expert with Android services (foreground / background), broadcast receivers, notification channels, and job scheduling strategies (Work Manager, Alarm Manager, Job Scheduler) for resilience. Strong with speech / audio on Android Performance and power expertise : memory / CPU profiling, power manager / doze behavior, app standby limits, Perfetto / Systrace, tooling‐driven optimizations. Comfortable with IPC and cross‐process communication patterns (Binder / Messenger / Broadcast Receiver), and threading / handler models on Android. Nice to have Swift / i OS native experience for similar audio / speech / service patterns (SFSpeech Recognizer, AVAudio Engine). On‐device AI experience : Gemini Nano, ML Kit, or Tensor Flow Lite for lightweight on‐device inference. Hotword / always‐on voice detection design and DSP‐backed paths when devices permit. AVD‐based testing and automation for speech recognition scenarios; design reliable test matrices for vendor‐specific behaviors. Familiarity with Store policies and possible choke points regarding features usage Working style Professional, meticulous, and up‐to‐date with Android platform changes. Comfortable owning the native layer end‐to‐end : design, implementation, profiling, and hardening for production reliability. Pragmatic and collaborative — small, friendly team, high signal, low ceremony. How to apply Send your CV, Git Hub / Bitbucket, and a brief note describing : A challenging Android service or speech / audio project you’ve owned. A performance or power issue you diagnosed and how you fixed it. Your location and availability for occasional meetups around Fuengirola (Costa del Sol). We’re excited to meet someone who loves working close to the metal on Android and enjoys squeezing maximum reliability and efficiency out of mobile devices. Must be based near Costa del Sol (Fuengirola). Remote work with periodic in‐person sessions is required. Compensation is fair and market‐competitive, commensurate with experience. Start date : Flexible, as soon as we find the right person. Language : English. Contract type : Flexible (contract or full‐time). Hardware : We can provide test devices if needed. Confidentiality : NDA may be required. In a sentence : Native Android speech and service stack, keep it lean and resilient, and help us push the platform to its limits responsibly.