Senior Mobile Engineer (Mobile & Wearables)

About Sidekick Labs

Sidekick Labs is building AI-powered AR smart glasses for travel: agentic wearables that give every traveller their own personal travel entourage. Hands-free, our AI books the restaurant, navigates the city, breaks language barriers, turns photos into travel journals, and adapts to what each traveller is looking at and interested in. Travellers capture more, immerse more deeply, and stay off their phones and out of tourist tracks, without ever being pulled out of the moment itself. Phones can't do this hands-free; general-purpose AI can't ground itself in a real-world place. Sidekick exists to do both at once.

We're early in our journey: the product is shipping, going to market is just ahead. We're a tight team hiring to fill the critical fields; the work is broad but the direction is clear.

The Role

An early engineering hire at Sidekick, joining the mobile and wearables team alongside the rest of engineering. Based in Singapore.

You'll lead the development of our end-user hardware interfaces and companion experiences, using Kotlin Multiplatform to deliver consistent, high-performance experiences across iOS, Android, and our proprietary wearable: Sidekick glasses. The last mile of AI integration — bringing multimodal capabilities and agentic tools directly into the user's field of vision. You work across the full stack of a custom-built device, from the KMP logic on the glasses to the companion app that orchestrates the experience around them.

You work directly with the CTO and the rest of the team, in the room for the technical calls. As the mobile and wearables team grows with the company, your scope grows with it. What you build becomes the experience travellers actually wear.

The work sits at the intersection of AI, hardware, and travel — three of the most active spaces in tech right now. The team experiments with new AI tools as they come, and learns together.

The product lives out in the world. Engineering decisions get sharper when you've seen the system meet reality — at venues, with travellers, in the markets, technical setup included. Hybrid, leaning heavily toward in-person.

Who We Are Looking For

Sidekick is a lean team. We want it to feel like a team playing well together — chasing something we care about, getting better at it, enjoying the people in the room. Whatever the role, the people who fit best share a common shape.

1. Teammate. Has each other's back. Holds themselves and the team to a high bar. Invested in how the team plays, not just themselves.
2. High ownership. Owns their patch and runs with it. Brings drive, hunger, and the instinct to figure out whatever the work needs.
3. Maturity. Holds tradeoffs in view and calls them honestly. Can disagree in the room and still commit once the team has chosen a direction.
4. AI fluency. Ideally already lives with AI day-to-day, deep in their workflow and beyond chat apps. At minimum, real curiosity and a clear-eyed view of what to hand to AI.
5. Comfort with newness. Smart wearables, AR, and the AI/agentic space move fast — old playbooks are useful but not gospel. Humble about what they don't know, confident enough to swing anyway.
6. Passion for the mission. Genuinely interested in what Sidekick is building, and just as into travellers and the travel industry itself.
7. Global perspective. First-hand exposure to AI or travel markets, ideally both, with a clear read on how customers and competition behave.
   

What You'll Own

1. Multiplatform architecture and companion app. You maintain and expand the shared KMP modules running across Android, iOS, and the Sidekick glasses, covering telemetry, networking, and sensor data processing. You also own the companion app that orchestrates the experience around the glasses end-to-end. The architecture has to hold as the surface area grows across three platforms with different constraints.
2. Hardware and software co-design. You work closely with firmware engineers to shape the communication protocols and APIs between the glasses and the rest of the stack. Decisions made here ripple into everything downstream.
3. Real-time multimodal flows. Low-latency audio and video streams from the glasses to the cloud, so the AI can see what the user sees with no perceptible lag. This is the work that makes "AI in your line of sight" actually feel like that.
4. Device lifecycle. Bluetooth state management, secure hardware attestation, and OTA firmware update orchestration. The unglamorous work that keeps every glasses unit in the field reliable, recoverable, and up to date.
5. High-leverage engineering. You use agentic coding workflows day-to-day to accelerate delivery, freeing bandwidth for the genuinely hard problems: edge-case hardware states, power efficiency, and the network behaviours that don't show up until devices are out in the wild.

The pillars describe the surface area, not a constant five-way split. Prioritisation will be key, in sync with what the team is pushing on.

What You Bring

In addition to what we look for in every Sidekick team member, this role calls for:

1. Kotlin Proficiency. Production experience with Kotlin and the KMP ecosystem, including Kotlin/Native.
2. Platform expertise. Strong on one platform (Android with Jetpack Compose, or iOS with SwiftUI), comfortable in the other, with KMP as the shared layer to bridge them.
3. Hardware fluency. Deep experience with BLE communication, background sync, and sensor data processing on resource-constrained devices.
4. Real-time media. Hands-on experience with real-time streaming protocols, WebSockets, or high-frequency data pipelines.
5. Agentic coding and engineering. Proficient with AI-powered development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) for managing complex refactors and keeping architectural integrity at velocity. You also know where they break down: when to override the output, when to slow down for the parts that have to hold in production, and how to get the most leverage from these tools without letting code quality drift.
6. Builder instinct. Comfortable starting work before someone else has fully defined what "done" looks like, and shaping the system as you go.

Even better if any of these apply:

• Travel or tourism industry background.
• Comfort reading or interfacing with C/C++ firmware layers.
• Previous experience in wearable tech, robotics, or IoT.
• Understanding of cryptographic signing and secure device communication.