Senior Android Developer (Kotlin Native) — PDF/Document Reader App

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 from home

Work Location: Remote