Senior Software Engineer, Android

Ditto•Washington, DC

1d•$227,000 - $259,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll design, build, and ship software that brings Ditto's data synchronization capabilities directly into the tools and environments where defense users operate. You'll own complex, ambiguous problems end to end—from architecture and implementation through deployment—with a particular focus on mobile applications, plugins, and integrations that meet users where they are. Beyond your own delivery, you'll set technical direction for this area, raise the engineering bar across the team, and mentor other engineers. You'll also serve as a senior technical voice in a key feedback loop with our core product engineering team, translating lessons from real-world usage into clear technical insights, architectural recommendations, and product requirements. This role is well suited to a highly adaptable senior engineer who is comfortable owning ambiguity, driving technical strategy, and helping teams deliver reliable software under real operational pressure.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, including a strong track record of building, shipping, and maintaining production applications at scale. You should be comfortable working across the full stack and have deep, demonstrated expertise in at least one technical area.
4+ years of mobile application development experience, including deep familiarity with the Android SDK, Kotlin and/or Java, and the practical challenges of building reliable software for diverse mobile hardware.
Strong integration design skills, including the ability to define clean API contracts, design data synchronization patterns, and architect loosely coupled systems that interoperate reliably across organizational and technical boundaries.
Demonstrated technical leadership, including making architectural decisions, setting technical direction for a team or project, weighing trade-offs, and communicating rationale to engineers and stakeholders.
A track record of mentoring engineers through code review, design guidance, or direct coaching.
A highly adaptable, problem-solving mindset, with the ability to navigate ambiguity, move quickly, and balance immediate operational fixes with long-term technical fidelity.
Strong written and verbal communication skills. As a crucial bridge between the operational edge and our core development team, you must be able to translate complex technical realities, edge cases, and user workflows into clear, actionable requirements and architectural recommendations for product engineers and leadership.

Nice To Haves

CRDTs or local-first architectures for managing complex data synchronization without a central server.
Cross-platform mobile development experience or strategies for maintaining parity across Android and other platform targets, such as iOS, Windows, or Linux.
Significant ATAK/TAK ecosystem experience, including ATAK plugin development or deep familiarity with CoT messaging, TAK Server integration, and plugin architecture. Prior experience leading plugin development efforts is strongly preferred.
Tactical networking familiarity, including how mobile devices operate over constrained, mesh, or MANET radio networks.
Embedded databases and offline-first persistence experience with SQLite, Realm, or similar technologies for mobile applications.
Tactical edge deployment experience, including deploying and supporting software on end-user devices in field exercises or operational environments.
SOCOM, Department of Defense, or federal customer experience, with an understanding of secure or classified network environments.
Technical lead experience on a small team or complex, cross-functional initiative.
Backend or systems development experience, such as Go, Rust, or Python, enabling rapid prototyping of integration middleware or data translation services.

Responsibilities

Own technical strategy and delivery: Drive the design, development, and field deployment of applications and plugins that integrate Ditto's data synchronization capabilities into the warfighter's primary situational awareness tools, setting patterns and standards for other engineers to follow.
Build Android-native integrations: Architect and develop performant Android applications and services that run on tactical end-user devices, ensuring reliable operation in disconnected, intermittent, and low-bandwidth (DIL) environments. Establish technical standards for reliability and performance in this space.
Own integration architecture: Drive end-to-end integration design between Ditto's platform and the broader TAK ecosystem. Define data contracts, API boundaries, and synchronization patterns that enable seamless interoperability with third-party systems and services, and evaluate architectural trade-offs that shape the platform's long-term direction.
Solve problems in real time: Act as a senior technical escalation point, rapidly diagnosing and resolving complex application, integration, and data-flow issues on end-user devices in live operational environments. Build the tooling and practices that enable the broader team to do the same.
Mentor and elevate the team: Provide technical mentorship to other engineers working in this space, review designs and code, and help grow the team's depth in Android, ATAK/TAK, and integration architecture.
Influence the edge integration roadmap: Partner with product and engineering leadership to define priorities for edge integration work based on firsthand knowledge of field constraints and operational realities.