Software Engineer - Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform

About us:

Calder is solving the data bottleneck for embodied AI and world models. Today's AI models lack the real-world, 4D data needed to reason on spatial problems and operate in physical environments. We capture, process, and deliver high-fidelity human-generated spatial data at scale, providing the substrate that trains the next generation of generalizable models for manipulation, navigation, and interaction.

About the role:

The Crowdsourcing Platform team connects people worldwide with opportunities to collect and contribute data for Physical AI. We build the contributor experience and infrastructure that turn individual contributions into high-quality datasets for AI developers. Physical AI is the largest economic opportunity since the industrial revolution and we aim to provide anyone, anywhere a way to earn by helping autonomous vehicles, manufacturing robots, and humanoids learn to operate in the real world.

You'll build the native mobile apps that help contributors collect data, and get paid, and the connection between those apps and our data collection hardware. The app is built in React Native with substantial native layers in Swift and Kotlin, and most of the hard problems live in the native layer. Your work sits where phones, devices, firmware, and the cloud meet, and it directly affects both contributors' efficiency and earnings and the data available to train autonomous systems.

• 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 that move large volumes of sensor, video, and media data from devices to phones to the cloud, with 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 (OTA) firmware updates through the app.

• Build offline-first experiences that hold up on low-end devices, poor connectivity, and 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.

About you:

• Several years building and shipping mobile apps that people depend on in production, with real depth in both Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android).

• Comfort working across a React Native / TypeScript app and its native modules. You'll cross 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: wireless protocols, binary serialization, flow control, error handling, and recovering from partial or failed transfers.

• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to design, debug, and operate reliable systems, including debugging across the app, device, and network boundary.

• Care for the people using your 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.

Experience that would be especially useful:

• 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 platform constraints on iOS and Android.

• Working with camera, GPS, IMU, or other sensor data on mobile or embedded devices.

• 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.

• Tools for data collection, mapping, robotics, or autonomous systems.

Calder is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Learn more here.

By applying for this position, you consent to the collection, storage, and processing of your personal data by Calder for recruitment purposes. We will handle your information securely and in accordance with local privacy policies. Your data may be shared with authorized third-party service providers aiding in the hiring process.