Senior Android Developer (Kotlin Native) — (open to all but Indian nationals preferred)
About the Role
We're building Paperlens— a document intelligence app for India's next 500 million smartphone users. Scan, OCR, translate, extract tables, convert to Word/Excel — designed for Indian SMBs, students, and tier 2/3 city users who deal with Aadhaar, PAN, GST invoices, and government forms daily.
We're a small, fast-moving team. The person we hire will own the Android app end-to-end and ship features that real users pay for.
What you'll build
- The core scan pipeline: camera capture, edge detection, perspective correction, multi-page PDF generation
- On-device OCR for English and AI-powered tools (we have already tested the backend)
- File intelligence: smart discovery of existing PDFs on device via MediaStore, AI-assisted renaming and organization
- A scanner that actually works on a SDK Andriod 8+
What we're looking for
Must have
- 2+ years shipping production Android apps in Kotlin (not Flutter, not React Native — native)
- At least 2 apps live on the Play Store you can point us to
- Strong with Jetpack Compose, Coroutines/Flow, MVVM, Room, Retrofit
Good to have experience:
- CameraX or Camera2 — you've built something that uses the camera, not just Intent.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE
- ML Kit experience — Text Recognition, Document Scanner, or both
- You've shipped through Scoped Storage / MediaStore / SAF and have opinions about which to use when
- Understand bitmap memory management deeply enough that your app doesn't OOM on a 3GB RAM device
Strong bonus
- Worked with OpenCV on Android or other image processing pipelines
- Experience with PDF generation/manipulation — iText, PdfDocument, or PDFBox
- Have integrated Tesseract or other OCR engines beyond ML Kit
- Shipped apps with significant user bases in India (tier 2/3 user research a plus)
- JNI / native C++ bridging for performance-critical paths
- Have built a scanner, camera, or document app before (huge plus — say so loudly in your application)
Nice to have but not required
- iOS experience or Kotlin Multiplatform — we'll need iOS eventually
- Background in Android platform / AOSP
- Built or contributed to open-source Android libraries
What we don't care about
- Degrees from specific colleges
- Years of experience on paper if you can demonstrate the skills
- Whether you've worked at big tech — small-team builders preferred
- Leetcode rank
How we work
- Small team, direct communication, no layers
- Weekly demo of what's shipped, not weekly status meetings
- Heavy AI tooling in our workflow (Claude, Cursor) — you should be comfortable using AI to ship faster, but you review every line
- Code quality and crash-free rate matter — we're building for users with one phone and patchy internet, not for a hackathon demo
Pay: $10,000.00 - $140,000.00 per year
Benefits:
Work Location: Remote