Software Engineer - Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform

Calder • Redwood City, CA

2d

About The Position

Calder is solving the data bottleneck for embodied AI and world models by capturing, processing, and delivering high-fidelity human-generated spatial data at scale. The Crowdsourcing Platform team connects people worldwide with opportunities to collect and contribute data for Physical AI, building the contributor experience and infrastructure that turn individual contributions into high-quality datasets for AI developers.

In this role, you will build native mobile apps that help contributors collect data and get paid, along with the connection between those apps and Calder’s data collection hardware. The app uses React Native with substantial native layers in Swift and Kotlin, and many of the challenging problems are in the native layer. Your work will span phones, devices, firmware, and the cloud, affecting both contributors’ efficiency and earnings and the data available to train autonomous systems.

Requirements

• Several years of experience building and shipping mobile apps used in production, with real depth in both Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android).
• Comfort working across a React Native / TypeScript app and its native modules, including crossing the JS-to-native bridge daily.
• Hands-on experience integrating mobile apps with embedded devices or firmware, such as BLE peripherals, IoT devices, cameras, or sensors.
• Strong understanding of communication and data transfer systems, including wireless protocols, binary serialization, flow control, error handling, and recovery from partial or failed transfers.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and ability to design, debug, and operate reliable systems, including debugging across app, device, and network boundaries.
• Care for people using the software, including those with different devices, connectivity, languages, and technical experience.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into practical solutions and own them from design through production.
• Good judgment about when to move fast and when correctness, quality, or reliability needs deeper investment.

Nice To Haves

• Writing or reading embedded firmware (C/C++, RTOS, or embedded Linux).
• Building OTA update systems or device fleet management tools.
• Handling large media or sensor uploads from mobile at scale, including background transfers and iOS and Android platform constraints.
• Working with camera, GPS, IMU, or other sensor data on mobile or embedded devices.
• Experience with cross-platform or shared-code approaches (Kotlin Multiplatform, Rust, C++ shared libraries) where they make sense.
• Building marketplaces, contributor platforms, or products for large and diverse user groups.
• Experience with tools for data collection, mapping, robotics, or autonomous systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship native iOS and Android apps covering discovery, onboarding, task instructions, data capture, submission, feedback, and payment.
• Integrate mobile apps with data collection hardware over BLE, Wi-Fi, and USB, including device pairing, provisioning, configuration, and status monitoring.
• Design reliable data transfer pipelines for moving large volumes of sensor, video, and media data from devices to phones to the cloud, including chunking, resumable uploads, retries, compression, and integrity checks.
• Work with firmware engineers to define communication protocols, message formats, and device APIs, and support over-the-air firmware updates through the app.
• Build offline-first experiences that work on low-end devices, with poor connectivity, and with limited battery and storage.
• Build on-device quality checks that give contributors real-time feedback and give AI teams confidence in the data they receive.
• Improve app reliability, performance, and observability as the platform grows across geographies, devices, and collection methods.
• Work closely with contributors, operations, hardware, and AI teams to understand problems, make technical decisions, and ship improvements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed