Kotlin Engineer – (Senior/Staff)

VirtusLab is a leading European software consulting and engineering company, home to over 350 EU-based professionals. Our mission is to craft clean code and practical solutions with precision and purpose. We foster a dynamic culture rooted in strong engineering, a sense of ownership, and transparency, empowering our team. As part of the expanding VirtusLab Group, we offer a compelling environment for those seeking to make a substantial impact in the software industry within a forward-thinking organization.

• Strong Kotlin skills or strong Java expertise with knowledge of Kotlin.
• Understanding of asynchronous and concurrent programming, preferably with Kotlin Coroutines.
• High agency and ability to drive work in a changing environment.
• Engineering pragmatism: cutting complexity while keeping the system extensible.
• Hands-on experience using LLMs daily, with judgment to know when they help and when they don’t.
• Fluency in English with good communication skills for a remote-first team.
• Self-motivation and ability to take full ownership of features end-to-end.

Nice to have:

• Experience with different LLM agents and their configurations.
• Experience with IDE development, especially around JetBrains IDEs.
• Hands-on experience with developer tooling (compiler, build tools, linters, IDE, agents).
• Experience with creating OS-native desktop applications.
• Experience with creating GUIs using JVM (Swing, SWT, etc.).

About the role:

• Build various tooling using mainly Kotlin.
• Work on IntelliJ plugin, IDEs, coding agents, or frameworks for Local AI inference.
• Focus 100% on technology with developers as users.
• Work within a small, flexible team with a lot of autonomy.
• Responsible for design, scope, testing, and implementation.
• Collaborate with tooling engineers and be part of an organization specialized in developer tooling.

Project: Local Inference Platform

• Build a desktop application for deploying and configuring local inference on local devices (e.g., NVIDIA Spark / DGX Spark).
• Manage model lifecycle (start/stop).
• Connect coding agents like Claude Code and Codex to locally hosted models.
• Develop an internal MVP on the road to open source.

Challenges:

• Build a desktop control plane for local AI agents that abstracts away complexities of running LLMs on heterogeneous hardware.
• Handle model lifecycle, proxy routing, agent configuration, and OS-specific quirks.
• Keep the system extensible to evolve toward open source.
• Visualize model statistics and system load on top of a backend that manages deployment.
• Work in a small, startup-like team with no bureaucracy, direct contact with potential users, and fast iteration.
• Participate in code reviews as part of the process.