Mobile Engineer: Android

Desert Ant Labs; Amsterdam; Remote; EUR 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Desert Ant Labs in Amsterdam is seeking an Android performance engineer to speed up machine learning models on mobile chips across devices, including budget phones and flagships. You will profile and optimize inference in Android runtimes and write native code with JNI to improve library performance.

You will test on a range of Android devices in our labs and Firebase Test Lab, maintain an Android library used by external developers, and collaborate to ship fast, reliable code.

Qualifications

• Seasoned Android performance engineer with track record of speeding up apps or libraries on real devices.
• Experience profiling and accelerating inference on Android runtimes across NPUs/GPUs/memory.
• Experience with JNI or native code and maintaining an Android library used by external developers.

Responsibilities

• Profile and speed up inference on Android runtimes such as LiteRT and ONNX Runtime across devices.
• Test on budget phones and flagships in device labs and Firebase Test Lab.

Skills

Android profiling

JNI

C/C++

Performance optimization

Tools

LiteRT

ONNX Runtime

Firebase Test Lab

Job description

Build our Kotlin SDK, and find the fastest way to run each model on each Android chip.

• Bring every model to Android, and make each one fast on budget phones and flagships.
• You've made Android apps or libraries measurably faster on real phones, with or without machine learning.

Location Amsterdam, Remote

Time zone UTC-5 to UTC+1

Type Full time

About the role

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

• 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

• 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.
• Wrote JNI or native code.
• Maintained an Android library that outside developers used.

How we work

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.