Key Skills

Job Description

Build our Kotlin SDK, and find the fastest way to run each model on each Android chip. About Desert Ant Labs Desert Ant Labs is an on-device AI lab in Europe. We're building efficient frontier intelligence, bottom up. We make the fastest model for each task, built to run on the billions of phones, laptops, and browsers people already own. Every model is lightning fast and private, and has no per-call cost. Little brains in every product. With our native SDKs for Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript, you add a model to an app in a few lines of code. Data stays with your customer, and the feature works without a cloud provider. Every role here pushes the limits of what a phone or a laptop can do. About the role You work on our Kotlin SDK, which runs our models on Android, on LiteRT today. The first goal is every model on Android by December. Android phones use hundreds of different chips, NPUs, and drivers. You speed up each model, across audio, vision, and text, until the model meets its latency target on a budget phone as well as on a flagship. Deep Android performance experience matters more here than machine learning experience. What you will do Build the Kotlin SDK: API design, releases to Maven Central, tests, and docs. Keep every model's results on Android the same as on Apple platforms. Profile and speed up inference on Android runtimes such as LiteRT and ONNX Runtime: delegates, NPUs, GPUs, and memory. Test on everything from budget phones to flagships, in Firebase Test Lab and in our own device lab. You might be a fit if you Have shipped Android apps or libraries with a large user base, and made them measurably faster: startup, rendering, memory, or battery. Write fluent Kotlin, know Jetpack Compose, and use the NDK when a runtime needs native code. Profile before you optimize. Write clean, tested code, and spot a weak change in review, whether a person or an agent wrote it. Plan and run your work through coding agents such as Claude Code, with a low tolerance for slop. Bonus points Know which NPUs exist, where LiteRT delegates speed up a model, and where the delegates fail. Integrated an on-device model with TensorFlow Lite, LiteRT, ONNX Runtime, ExecuTorch, MediaPipe, or NNAPI. Wrote JNI or native code. Maintained an Android library that outside developers used. How we work We're a small, flat team, and we build the models, the SDKs, and the apps that use them. Detail and Subwave, our own apps, run our models in production. Start what needs starting without waiting to be asked, and finish what you start. Take on work outside your role when a project needs you. We ship quickly, so we cut scope until only the part users notice is left. Anyone can comment on your work or redo your draft, and we say early when work isn't ready. We read that feedback as help. We judge the work by what shipped and what changed because of it. Nobody counts hours. What we offer Salary and equity, based on level. In our Amsterdam office, or remote anywhere between Eastern Time in North America (UTC-5) and Central European Time (UTC+1), so everyone shares part of the working day. Recruiters and agencies We hire directly. We don't reply to emails from recruiters or agencies, and we don't want their outreach about this role or any other. Location: Amsterdam or Remote (UTC-5 to UTC+1) Apply on our site: https://desertant.com/jobs/mobile-engineer-android/

Core Responsibilities

Build and maintain the Kotlin SDK, including API design, releases, tests, and documentation, while ensuring Android model results match those on Apple platforms. Profile and optimize model inference across Android runtimes and devices, testing performance from budget phones to flagship devices.

Requirements

Candidates should have shipped Android apps or libraries with a large user base and measurably improved performance, and should be fluent in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose experience. They should profile before optimizing, write clean and tested code, and be comfortable using the NDK and coding agents; on-device ML runtime experience is a bonus.

Benefits

• Salary
• Equity