Staff Engineer - Mobile, Desktop & KMP
Bengaluru • FullTime
Posted 26d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Sarvam is building India's sovereign AI platform, focusing on research, models, infrastructure, and applications to make AI work for India. The company partners with leading enterprises and public institutions. This role focuses on Sarvam's consumer and enterprise products, which are native applications running on devices like Android phones, iPhones, Windows laptops, Linux desktops, and Macs. These applications require on-device inference, audio capture/streaming, and offline functionality, needing to perform reliably across a wide range of hardware and network conditions in India. The Staff Engineer will own the client application layer across mobile and desktop, using Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) as a unifying technology to manage development across five platforms without separate codebases. This is an individual contributor role where you will collaborate closely with backend, model serving, and product teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture of mobile and desktop applications using Kotlin Multiplatform.
- Ship and evolve Indus and Kivi as native apps across five platforms, including chat/streaming UI, voice capture/playback, on-device/cloud model invocation, and offline-first behavior.
- Lead the KMP adoption strategy, defining shared modules and boundaries between common and native code.
- Build applications optimized for India's diverse device and network conditions, including low-RAM devices and intermittent connectivity.
- Integrate various model APIs (ASR, TTS, translation, LLM, vision) into the client, handling streaming responses and graceful degradation.
- Drive performance and reliability across platforms, focusing on metrics like cold-start time, memory footprint, audio latency, and crash-free rates.
- Set engineering standards for the client team, including CI/CD, automated testing, code review culture, and documentation.
- Determine the optimal balance between shared UI/platform code and native implementations.
- Partner with backend and inference teams on API contracts and streaming protocols.
- Mentor engineers on platform-native depth and KMP best practices.
Requirements
- 9+ years of experience building production mobile and/or desktop applications with strong ownership.
- Deep expertise in Kotlin, including coroutines and flows, and modern Android architecture.
- Comfort with Swift on iOS and at least one desktop platform (Windows, Linux, or macOS).
- Hands-on experience with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) in a shipped product, including designing shared modules and managing expect/actual boundaries.
- Strong command of native audio and streaming pipelines (capture, playback, buffering, VAD, codec handling, low-latency streaming).
- Experience shipping apps for constrained environments (offline-first, low-bandwidth, low-RAM).
- Solid networking and API integration skills, including streaming protocols, retry mechanisms, caching, and debugging.
- Hands-on experience with Compose Multiplatform and Jetpack Compose in production.
- Familiarity with CI/CD and automated testing across multiple platforms, including real-device testing.
- Strong judgment for making technical decisions regarding code sharing, abstraction, and optimization.