Software Engineer - Android

Location: Karachi, Pakistan

Why this role exists
Bykea moves people, parcels, and payments across Pakistan, and almost all of that happens through the app in someone's hand. Our engineering team is scaling fast, and the Android app is one of the most heavily used, highest-stakes pieces of that experience - it has to work on everything from a flagship phone to a five-year-old budget device, on patchy connectivity, in real time. We need a strong Android engineer to help own that.
This isn't a "ship a feature and move on" role. You'll be building applications for a range of Android devices, working shoulder-to-shoulder with product and engineering to define what gets built, and making sure it performs well once it's live - not just that it compiles.

What you'll actually do
1. Design and Build for the Android Platform: Design and build applications aimed at real Android devices in the field - phones and tablets, wide OS and hardware fragmentation included. You're not building for a demo device; you're building for whatever a rider, driver, or customer actually has.
2. Own Performance, Quality, and Responsiveness: Ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of the apps you ship. Identify and fix bottlenecks, squash bugs, and tune for real-world conditions - offline storage, threading, benchmarking, optimization. If it lags or drains the battery, that's your problem to solve.
3. Collaborate to Define and Ship Features: Work with product and engineering to define, design, and ship new features - not just implement a spec handed to you. Your input on what's feasible and what's worth building matters.
4. Connect the App to the Real World: Integrate with back-end services through RESTful APIs, work with frameworks like Google Maps and GPS optimization, Room DB, and cloud messaging/push notifications. This is where the app stops being a UI and starts being a product people rely on to get somewhere or get paid.
5. Keep the Codebase Healthy: Help maintain code quality, organization, and automation, and use code versioning tools properly. Table stakes, not the differentiator - but non-negotiable.
6. Bring Design and UX Judgment: Understand Android's design principles and interface guidelines, and stay familiar with broader web technologies and UI/UX standards, so what you build actually feels right on the platform.

Who we're looking for

• 4-5 years of hands-on Android development experience.
• 2+ years of experience with Jetpack libraries, especially Jetpack Compose for UI
• Proficient in Java, Kotlin, and SQL.
• Real experience with Android frameworks - Google Maps, GPS optimization, Room DB, and similar.
• Comfortable with offline storage, threading, and performance tuning.
• Familiar with RESTful APIs for connecting Android apps to back-end services.
• Knack for benchmarking and optimization - you notice what's slow and fix it.
• Entrepreneurial spirit: experience in scaled startups is a plus.
• Curious: genuinely enjoys learning new technologies, not just tolerating them.
• Analytical and adaptive: can write and discuss efficient algorithms, not just use them.
• Be competent in using AI and automation tools effectively and efficiently to boost productivity in all relevant areas of the role, including coding, code review, documentation, research, testing, etc. Should have experience using these tools for at least a year to know about the strengths and weaknesses of these tools.