Android SDK Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Android SDK Engineer to join our Mobile Observability team, responsible for designing, building, and maintaining our Android SDK, a production-grade instrumentation library embedded in customer applications running on millions of devices.

This is a hands-on, SDK-first role deeply rooted in the Android platform. You’ll work across Kotlin, Java, and selected native components to build performance monitoring, telemetry capture, crash detection and ANR monitoring - all with minimal overhead.

You'll contribute to critical low-level systems such as signal handling, stack unwinding, and lifecycle orchestration, while helping evolve a stable, developer-friendly API surface. You’ll collaborate across platform teams and contribute to evolving observability standards such as OpenTelemetry.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives close to the platform, has strong judgment around API design, and enjoys solving complex debugging and performance challenges in real-world mobile environments.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain an Android observability SDK used by external developers in production at scale
• Work on crash capture (JVM and NDK), ANR detection, performance tracing, and session orchestration
• Develop and maintain native (C/C++) components including signal handling and JNI bridges
• Evolve the SDK’s OpenTelemetry integration, spans, traces, and distributed tracing via W3C Traceparent
• Build reliable mechanisms for offline storage, batching, retries, and telemetry delivery
• Optimize for minimal SDK overhead: startup time, memory footprint, thread usage, and binary size
• Own API surface design, binary compatibility, and versioning for a public SDK
• Debug complex issues across devices, OS versions, OEMs, and customer environments
• Contribute to architectural decisions across a modular SDK codebase
• Establish best practices for testing, release safety, and code quality
• Partner with cross-platform SDK teams (React Native, Flutter, Unity) to maintain internal bridge interfaces and ensure native changes do not break downstream consumers

Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Kotlin, with solid working knowledge of Java
• Deep understanding of Android runtime fundamentals: lifecycle, threading/Looper, memory, startup behavior
• Experience working with native code (C/C++) on Android (NDK / JNI)
• Track record building or maintaining SDKs, libraries, or developer-facing platforms
• Experience using Git and modern CI/CD workflows
• Experience optimizing for performance and reliability
• Comfort debugging issues in production mobile environments
• Openness to AI-augmented engineering workflows
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially when discussing technical tradeoffs

Bonus Points

• Experience with Android Gradle Plugin internals, custom Lint rules, or bytecode instrumentation
• Open-source contributions
• Experience designing and evolving public APIs
• Experience maintaining backward compatibility
• Experience optimizing startup impact, memory footprint, or runtime overhead
• Exposure to cross-platform frameworks (React Native, Flutter, Unity), particularly understanding how native SDK changes ripple through those ecosystems
• Familiarity with modern Android tooling/ecosystem trends

Additional Expectations

Interview & Collaboration

Our interview process includes live, synchronous conversations. Final stages may include an in-person meeting with a team member (travel may be required).

Engineering Workflow Evolution

We work in an environment where AI-assisted tools are increasingly part of engineering workflows. We value pragmatic, thoughtful use of these tools. Candidates should be comfortable discussing their experience and perspective on AI-assisted development.

Role Focus

This role emphasizes SDK / framework / platform engineering, not application UI development.

Work Culture & Travel

We are a remote-first company. This role is open to candidates located anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. We believe in regular in-person connection and expect travel for team off-sites and collaboration to be approximately once per quarter.

The cash compensation for this role is in the $130k-170k range. In addition to base comp for this role, we offer equity in the form of options, a variety of benefits, and the opportunity to grow in an exciting and collaborative environment. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process.

Why Join Embrace?

As the only user-focused observability solution built on OpenTelemetry, Embrace delivers crucial insights across both DevOps, web and mobile teams to illuminate real customer impact – not just server impact – to deliver the best app experiences. Customers like The New York Times, Marriott, Masterclass, Home Depot, and Cameo love Embrace’s observability platform because it makes extremely complicated and voluminous data actionable. Our cultural values highlight how we seek to improve as individuals, team members, and a company each and every day.