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.