Forward Deployed Engineer - Mobile

PackageX is developing a Physical Logistics Execution Platform designed for enterprise teams operating across manufacturing sites, distribution centers, warehouses, retail locations, and logistics-intensive environments. The platform leverages Vision AI, workflow automation, mobile execution, and integrations to digitize, execute, and verify physical operations at the point of work, providing trusted evidence of operational activities. The core operating model focuses on execution, verification, and evidence.

PackageX is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer - Mobile to collaborate closely with customers, prospects, sales, product, engineering, AI, and implementation teams. This role involves understanding complex physical workflows, designing PackageX solutions, and implementing them in real-world environments. The ideal candidate is a highly skilled software engineer with strong native engineering fundamentals and experience building complex, performance-critical applications. Responsibilities span enterprise workflow design, solution configuration, customer operations, technical implementation, and ensuring go-live success. From pre-sales through pilot, implementation, testing, rollout, and launch, this role acts as a technical liaison translating customer requirements into validated, production-ready solutions. The engineer will architect and develop cross-platform applications using Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, addressing challenges across Android, iOS, and potentially desktop platforms. This is a hands-on, customer-facing role involving coding, workflow configuration, device provisioning, debugging on-site, and driving customer adoption.

Key Responsibilities:
- Participate in customer and prospect discussions during pre-sales to understand operational workflows.
- Engage with customers for discovery, workflow mapping, operational walkthroughs, pilot support, readouts, and go-live activities.
- Architect and develop scalable cross-platform applications using Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform.
- Design complex asynchronous workflows involving concurrent API requests, database operations, background processing, and computationally intensive tasks.
- Build efficient concurrency models to ensure responsiveness, resource efficiency, and predictable execution.
- Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks related to CPU, memory, threading, and UI rendering.
- Develop robust memory and resource management strategies for large datasets, image processing, and continuous data workloads.
- Create shared application infrastructure while addressing platform-specific requirements and native integrations.
- Make architectural decisions regarding modularity, concurrency, state management, persistence, and resource ownership.
- Profile, debug, and optimize applications across Android, iOS, and other supported platforms.
- Establish engineering standards, review technical implementations, and contribute to architectural decisions.

Required Qualifications:

*Kotlin & Language Fundamentals*
- Strong proficiency in Kotlin, including advanced language features and type system concepts.
- Understanding of functional programming, generics, inline functions, delegation, extension functions, and higher-order functions.
- Knowledge of immutability, state management, type safety, and API design.
- Ability to write allocation-efficient, maintainable, and testable Kotlin code.
- Familiarity with JVM and Kotlin/Native execution differences.

*Concurrency & Structured Concurrency*
- Deep understanding of concurrency, parallelism, threading, and asynchronous execution models.
- Expertise in Kotlin Coroutines, structured concurrency, dispatchers, scopes, and cancellation propagation.
- Knowledge of coroutine lifecycle management, exception propagation, supervision, and synchronization.
- Ability to design complex asynchronous workflows involving concurrent API calls, database operations, background processing, and UI updates.
- Understanding of race conditions, deadlocks, thread safety, shared mutable state, and synchronization primitives.
- Experience selecting execution contexts for CPU- and I/O-intensive workloads.
- Familiarity with backpressure, buffering, channels, flows, and concurrent data pipelines.
- Ability to manage long-running operations without blocking critical threads or degrading UI responsiveness.
- Awareness of threading constraints and concurrency differences across Android, iOS, and Kotlin/Native.

*Memory Management & Performance Optimization*
- Strong understanding of memory allocation, object lifetimes, garbage collection, and memory pressure.
- Experience identifying and resolving memory leaks, excessive allocations, and object retention.
- Knowledge of caching strategies, cache invalidation, memory constraints, and resource lifecycle management.
- Ability to profile and optimize CPU and memory consumption in production applications.
- Experience optimizing image processing, large data structures, serialization, and computationally expensive workloads.
- Understanding of buffer management, object reuse, allocation-efficient programming, and memory fragmentation.
- Ability to investigate performance degradation, memory spikes, and resource contention.
- Familiarity with Android Studio Profiler, Instruments, and platform-specific diagnostic tools.

*Kotlin/Native & Runtime Internals*
- Strong understanding of Kotlin/Native architecture, compilation pipeline, runtime behavior, and memory management.
- Knowledge of Kotlin/Native garbage collection, object lifetimes, memory allocation, and runtime characteristics.
- Experience with Kotlin/Native interoperability with Objective-C and Swift, including memory ownership and lifecycle considerations.
- Understanding of Kotlin Multiplatform compilation targets, source sets, native binaries, linking, and platform-specific dependencies.
- Awareness of JVM versus Native execution models, garbage collection differences, startup performance, and memory characteristics.
- Familiarity with GraalVM runtime architecture, compilation models, and native-image capabilities.
- Ability to reason about runtime performance, compilation trade-offs, and platform-specific optimizations.

*Application Architecture & System Design*
- Strong grasp of modular architecture, separation of concerns, dependency management, and abstraction boundaries.
- Ability to design scalable systems involving networking, persistence, caching, background processing, and complex data flows.
- Understanding of reactive programming, state management, and unidirectional data flow.
- Ability to evaluate architectural trade-offs between shared and platform-specific implementations.
- Experience designing systems handling large data volumes and continuous processing workloads.
- Ability to identify architectural bottlenecks and propose solutions improving maintainability, scalability, and performance.

*Compose Multiplatform & UI Engineering*
- Strong experience with Compose Multiplatform and declarative UI development.
- Deep understanding of Compose state management, recomposition, snapshot state, and rendering performance.
- Experience building reusable UI components, custom layouts, animations, and navigation systems.
- Knowledge of UI lifecycle, state restoration, and platform-specific UI behavior.
- Ability to diagnose unnecessary recompositions, UI jank, rendering bottlenecks, and memory inefficiencies.
- Experience integrating native platform capabilities into shared Compose applications.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits:
- Production experience shipping Kotlin Multiplatform applications across Android and iOS.
- Strong native Android development fundamentals.
- Experience with Swift, SwiftUI, and iOS application architecture.
- Experience with Kotlin/Native and Objective-C interoperability.
- Familiarity with Ktor, Koin, SQLDelight, Room KMP, and other multiplatform libraries.
- Experience with Gradle, Kotlin Multiplatform build configuration, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with desktop development using Compose Multiplatform.
- Familiarity with GraalVM and JVM performance optimization.
- Experience with computer vision, image processing, or other computationally intensive mobile workloads.

The ideal candidate demonstrates strong communication skills with both business and technical stakeholders, thrives in fast-moving and ambiguous environments, and possesses a deep understanding of software beyond framework abstractions. They can independently investigate and resolve complex concurrency, memory, and performance issues, make and defend architectural decisions, and clearly communicate technical concepts and trade-offs. Ownership from architecture through