Senior Android Developer (Kotlin) - Physical AI Research

About the role

A research and innovation team exploring Physical AI, autonomous systems and connected drones is looking for an experienced software engineer. The role focuses on connecting autonomous or remotely operated physical devices with cloud, edge and enterprise platforms, with initial use cases in crowd monitoring, public safety, emergency services and autonomous parcel delivery. It is primarily a backend and integration role, with Android-based devices and applications involved.

Key responsibilities

• Design and develop software supporting Physical AI and autonomous-system research use cases
• Build backend services and device-side components in Kotlin (Ktor highly desirable)
• Develop and integrate Android applications and services for connected devices, drones and edge platforms
• Implement RESTful APIs, WebSockets and event-driven interfaces between devices, edge platforms and the cloud
• Integrate with drone platforms, SDKs, telemetry services, sensors, cameras and other physical devices
• Enable real-time ingestion and processing of telemetry, location, sensor, image and video metadata
• Prototype new use cases from experiment to demonstrator and proof of concept
• Explore AI/ML and computer vision services in physical-system workflows
• Design solutions for device, edge and cloud environments, including intermittent connectivity
• Implement authentication, authorisation, encryption and secure communications
• Write automated unit, integration and API tests and contribute to CI/CD pipelines
• Diagnose complex problems across applications, networks, devices and cloud infrastructure
• Produce technical documentation and collaborate with researchers, engineers, network and AI specialists

Required profile

• BSc/MSc in Computer Science or a related field
• At least 6 years as an Android developer
• Kotlin is a must; Ktor experience is particularly valuable
• Experience deploying applications to a major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud

Required skills

• Android SDK and lifecycle, REST APIs, HTTP, WebSockets and messaging patterns
• Kotlin Coroutines, JSON and data serialisation
• Git, automated testing, CI/CD and DevOps practices
• Docker and Linux
• Desirable: drone/UAV technologies (MAVLink, PX4, ArduPilot, DJI SDKs), edge computing, computer vision, MQTT/Kafka, PostgreSQL or NoSQL, Kubernetes, Python, security and privacy principles