Senior Engineer, AI Hardware Application 高级工程师，AI 硬件应用开发

About Us
Orka is an innovative VC-backed startup revolutionizing the hearing aid market. Our mission is to improve lives by building exceptional hearing aids that combine cutting-edge technology with deeply personal experiences — transforming people's hearing journey from chaos to simplicity.
We believe hearing aids in new form-factor are becoming the first true AI always-on hardware: a device people wear all day, every day, that listens, understands, and assists in real time. We are building the AI application layer on top of it — AI audiologist, always-on voice intelligence, and seamless human-AI interaction that lives at the edge of hardware and software. With operations in the US and Mainland China and customers across North America and Europe, we are looking for an engineer who wants to define what "AI-native hardware applications" actually look like.

What You'll Do

• Build the AI always-on application layer: own the mobile-side AI experiences of our core products end-to-end — AI audiologist (AI AuD), always-on voice/audio features, and real-time human-device interaction — from prototype to launch and iteration.
• Prototype fast, ship stable: rapidly turn ideas into working AI application demos (LLM-powered flows, voice pipelines, on-device + cloud hybrid), then harden them into production-quality features.
• Bridge hardware and software: design and build reliable communication between mobile apps and our hardware — BLE connectivity, background execution, keep-alive strategies, low-latency audio/data channels — working closely with firmware engineers.
• Work AI-native: use AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) as a core part of your daily workflow for implementation, debugging, testing, documentation, and deployment — and help the team level up its AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Think like a product owner: look at the product full-stack — from silicon and firmware to app UX and cloud services — and turn ambiguous, evolving requirements into clear, shippable solutions.

What We're Looking For
Must-haves

• 3+ years of mobile development experience (iOS / Android, native or cross-platform such as Flutter / React Native), with real products shipped and maintained in production.
• Proven ability to build and ship fast: you can independently produce a working, stable AI application demo in days, not weeks.
• Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development: coding agents, LLM APIs, prompt/workflow design, and AI-assisted testing and deployment are already part of how you work — with the judgment to know where AI helps and where it hurts.
• Strong ownership and product sense: comfortable with ambiguity, able to define problems, make trade-offs, and drive features end-to-end.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: Git-based collaboration, testing, CI/CD, and writing maintainable code that survives contact with real users.

Strong pluses

• Experience with Bluetooth / BLE: GATT, connection management, background modes, keep-alive, OTA — or any hardware ↔ mobile communication work.
• Built real AI applications before: voice assistants, LLM-powered features, audio pipelines, on-device inference, or companion apps for AI hardware.
• Shipped consumer products to overseas markets, especially Europe (GDPR, localization, app store / regulatory compliance).
• Exposure to firmware or embedded systems — you don't need to write firmware, but you speak the language.
• Full-stack range: comfortable touching backend services, APIs, and cloud deployment when the product needs it.

Why Orka

• Work on one of the most compelling AI hardware form factors: an always-on, all-day wearable with real users whose lives depend on it.
• Small team, high ownership: your code ships to real customers in the US and Europe, fast.
• AI-native culture: we don't just build AI products — we build with AI, and we expect you to push that frontier with us.