Android Runtime Engineer - DevRel Team

Rive is where designers, animators, and developers build interactive experiences. Design, animate, and code in one place. What you build in the editor is what ships in your app, game, or website. No mockups, no prototypes, no handoff. The real thing.

Companies like Spotify, Duolingo, LinkedIn, Google, and Fortune 500 automakers use our open-source runtimes to build once and ship everywhere — websites, apps, games, and vehicles.

With Rive, designers and developers work with the same tools. No silos. What you see in the editor is what ships in production. In this role on our developer relations team, you'll help support and maintain a crucial part of the Rive product that makes this possible, the runtime libraries. These are open source runtimes that run Rive files natively on any platform. Powered by the Rive Renderer — a GPU-accelerated vector graphics engine running at 120fps.

Rive is looking for an experienced Android Engineer to join our Developer Relations team focused on the Android ecosystem. This role is centered around building, maintaining, and evolving Rive’s open source Android runtime. Ideal for someone who enjoys solving deep technical challenges, improving runtime architecture, and ensuring developers can rely on a stable, high-performance integration across the diverse Android platform.

While this role sits within Developer Relations, the focus is strongly technical. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and customers to help developers successfully ship Rive in production applications, provide guidance on best practices, and help influence the direction of the runtime through real-world feedback and debugging experience.

You'll join a dynamic team working on an exciting product, supporting a growing community of developers and designers looking to use Rive in their products and games. You'll have the autonomy to solve issues and develop features that enhance the Android runtime and create a great product experience. You'll also have the opportunity to expand your technical prowess across various runtimes, build fun projects, attend conferences, and collaborate with passionate individuals.

What you'll do

• Android Runtime Development:
• Develop, maintain, and evolve Rive’s Android runtime and supporting infrastructure.
• Build APIs to support Rive content in Jetpack Compose, Android Views and more.
• Integrate and expose capabilities from Rive’s core C++ runtime through JNI and Kotlin APIs.
• Ensure the Android runtime aligns consistently with the APIs and workflows of other Rive runtimes.
• Ensure support and performance on devices across the Android ecosystem.
• Expand the test suite for Rive Android.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across a wide array of devices
• Ensure graphics present as expected.
• Synchronize state and lifetimes between Kotlin and C++.
• Diagnose and correct performance pitfalls.
• Collaborate with new and existing customers.
• Triage project specific issues, capturing lessons learned as scalable documentation or API guidance.
• Ensure a smooth onboarding experience for new developers.
• Share best practices for production delivery.
• Support documentation efforts to create a comprehensive experience for new and experienced developers.
• Act as a technical expert on Android for the Rive engineering team.
• Collaborate with the team when new features are required or issues impact multiple runtimes.
• Prioritize between a number of important tasks in a rapidly evolving startup.
• Stay current with the latest developments in the Android ecosystem and plan support for new features, devices, and SDK versions.

What you will bring

• Android application development: experience building applications specifically for Android using Kotlin.
• Library development: experience building and maintaining a library used by other developers, including version management, change logs, and announcements.
• Native development: NDK, General C++ or better yet specific JNI binding experience is extremely helpful. You will be integrating with our C++ runtime.
• Strong troubleshooting: a track record of seeing tough bugs through to root cause and resolution, including preventing regressions and proactive prevention through unit testing.
• Performance minded: ability to measure, compare, and improve performance across CPU, GPU, memory, and energy consumption.
• An understanding of performance tooling such as Perfetto
• Knowledge of optimization techniques such as memoization, cache coherency, avoiding copies, and minimizing draw calls.
• Empathy for developers: knowing what makes a great first experience using an SDK, and what changes will positively impact the long term.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience using Rive!
• Experience with, or an interest in learning, multiple-platform frameworks, such as Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform, React Native, and Flutter.

Location: North America remote, with the ability to work overlapping hours centered around U.S. Pacific time and come to the San Francisco office on occasion to collaborate in person.

Compensation and benefits: We offer a remote work environment, comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage as well as stock options. The base salary range for this role is $170-190k. Compensation may depend on level of experience and geographic location.

At Rive we are a global group of passionate designers and developers who believe in transparency, failing fast, quick iteration, and experimentation. We aim to build a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone feels supported.

We have an incredible opportunity to be game changers in the world of creating interactive content. Help us accelerate the design industry's transition to Rive!

A human will read your resume, cover letter, and answers to the application questions so please take a minute and tell us more about yourself! Applications suspected to be entirely AI-generated may not be considered. We value genuine, thoughtful responses and authentic, human communication. Please start your answers to the 1st application question with the phrase 'I am a human applicant' so we know you read this.