Nick Achtien

Staff Android Engineer

Oakland, CA · 630-400-9091 · nachtien@gmail.com

nickachtien.com · github.com/nachtien · linkedin.com/in/nachtien

Summary

Android engineer, ten years, all of it shipping production mobile. I hold US Patent 10,820,358 as first-named inventor for a Bluetooth Low Energy communication layer that replaced Android's callback API with suspending calls. Most recently I built a server-driven UI system in Jetpack Compose so product teams could ship screens without an app release. I have led Kotlin Multiplatform architecture shared across iOS, Android and web since 2020, and I build with LLMs in the product, not just in the editor.

Skills

UI
Jetpack Compose, Compose Multiplatform, Material Design
Architecture
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), MVVM, MVI, Koin, Server-driven UI, Modularization
Networking & Data
Retrofit, Ktor, Apollo GraphQL, SQLDelight, Kotlinx Serialization
Leadership
Technical leadership, Mentoring, Architecture planning, Interviewing & hiring
AI
LLM pipeline design & integration, AI-driven product features, Agentic dev tooling (Claude Code, Codex)

Professional Experience

Tools For Humanity — Staff Android Engineer

Jan 2025 – Aug 2025 · Remote

  • Architected a server-driven UI system in Jetpack Compose for World App, which has over 10 million downloads. Product teams define transaction-history screens as backend schema and ship them without an app release, which took feature turnaround from a multi-day store cycle to a same-day deploy.
  • Designed the schema contract and the Compose component registry it renders through, so screens are composed server-side from components the client team has already hardened.
  • Wrote the versioning strategy for clients that never update. When a client meets a schema version it cannot render, it falls back to native rendering instead of crashing.
  • Handled currency, locale and formatting for balances, transaction amounts and timestamps across every market World App ships in. In a financial app these are correctness requirements, not presentation choices.
  • Co-owned the API contract with backend engineering rather than receiving it, and set the architectural direction for the same pattern on iOS.

Transcarent / 98point6 — Lead Android Engineer / Full-Stack Engineer

May 2022 – Dec 2024 · Remote

  • Led a Kotlin Multiplatform library that shares business logic across iOS and Android. Shared features get built once instead of twice, which cut effort on them roughly in half and removed the behaviour drift that came with two implementations.
  • Introduced Jetpack Compose to the Android codebase and got the team productive in it.
  • Rolled out Renovate across the company so dependency updates stopped being a chore anyone had to remember. Fewer stale dependencies, fewer security advisories sitting open.
  • Put linting and static analysis gates into CI in front of every merge.
  • Built the cross-platform onboarding flow in Flutter for mobile and React for web, and maintained the Node.js backend behind it.

Structionsite — Lead Android Engineer

Mar 2020 – Apr 2022 · Remote

  • Migrated the app to Jetpack Compose and broke thousand-line files into components a new engineer could actually read.
  • Modularized the codebase. Build times dropped about 30% and ownership boundaries stopped being ambiguous.
  • Wrote a panoramic image viewer in OpenGL for construction site capture.
  • Built a shared GraphQL library in Kotlin Multiplatform that both the iOS and Android apps consume.

JUUL Labs — Android Engineer

Jul 2017 – Apr 2019 · San Francisco, CA

  • Co-invented the BLE communication layer the app runs on, granted as US Patent 10,820,358 with me as first-named inventor. It replaces Android's callback-based Bluetooth API with suspending calls over a serialized operation queue, so device operations read as sequential code and stop racing each other.
  • Built the Android app from nothing on a compressed timeline: pairing, device control, usage tracking and over-the-air firmware updates for a first-of-its-kind connected consumer device.
  • Integrated third-party identity verification that gates device activation over BLE, so unlocking hardware depends on a cloud verification result.
  • Set up the interview and hiring pipeline as the team scaled, along with onboarding standards and core team structure.

PAX Labs — Android Engineer

Jul 2016 – Jul 2017 · San Francisco, CA

  • Built the first Android app for a BLE-connected consumer device, from an empty repository.
  • Helped architect the Android BLE stack, including secure communications and encrypted local storage.
  • Co-authored a scheme for higher-range, lower-energy communication in situations that needed it.
  • Pushed the team onto Agile, Jira and CI.

Independent Work

Independent — Lead Engineer — Cross-Platform AI Product

Aug 2024 – Present · Oakland, CA

  • Designed and shipped a production AI product on my own, across every layer: a Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform client sharing logic with a React web frontend, a Node.js and Postgres backend, and the infrastructure under it on Cloudflare, Railway and Google Cloud.
  • Built the LLM pipeline that drives the characters. It holds per-player narrative state in Postgres rather than in the context window, so a player's story survives across days and branches on what they actually did.
  • Delivered the whole experience over SMS through Twilio. No app install, no account, and no UI affordances to lean on, so session state had to be reconstructed from message content and timing.
  • Wrote internal tooling on Claude that generates narrative content and puzzle clues, which cut prototyping time on new story branches.

Patents

Education

Northern Illinois University — B.S. Computer Science, DeKalb, IL