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SENIOR ANDROID / AAOS ENGINEER

Building media
experiences
for cars.

At the intersection of automotive media,
Android performance, and systems engineering.

Explore my work A little about me

Adrian Rusu

Adrian RusuSenior Android / AAOS Engineer

ANDROID AUTOMOTIVEThoughtful interfaces. Deliberate architecture.

AAOS·Kotlin·Android Media·Performance·Rust·C++

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01 / SELECTED WORK

Built to understand.
Designed to go deeper.

FLAGSHIP PROJECT

PandaWave.

An AAOS media platform built to explore what lives underneath the screen.

Kotlin and Media3 own the Android experience. Binder/AIDL and JNI cross into PandaEngine, a Rust runtime that owns client state and domain decisions. Canopy provides the gRPC backend, PostgreSQL persistence and authorized media delivery.

AAOSKotlinMedia3AIDLRust

Explore the case study GitHub

PANDAWAVE / RUNNING ON AAOS

PandaWave recommendations and media playback on Android Automotive

A real interface. An explicit system underneath. ↗

Canopy gRPC services and PostgreSQL policy authority, separate from the Nginx media byte path

Rust media backend02

Canopy

The Rust control plane behind PandaWave. Identity, catalog/search, profile state and playback authorization over gRPC, with PostgreSQL as the policy authority and Nginx handling protected media delivery.

RustgRPCPostgreSQLTonic

Read the case study

A canopy.v1 Protobuf contract generates immutable SDKs for PandaEngine and Canopy

Versioned API contract03

canopy-api

A shared Protobuf contract that lets PandaEngine and Canopy evolve independently while keeping compatibility explicit.

ProtobufgRPCBufVersioning

Explore the contract

Vector growth from capacity four to eight with live objects and unconstructed storage

Systems learning lab04

C++ Mastery

Rebuilding familiar abstractions to make object lifetime, ownership, memory and failure paths visible.

C++MemoryTemplatesSanitizers

Explore the learning lab

02 / ENGINEERING FOCUS

The experience is on screen.
The thinking goes deeper.

Automotive media

Production AAOS and HMI work across playback, sessions, audio focus and interaction patterns designed for the car.

AAOS · MediaSession · HMI

Performance engineering

Following the evidence from a slow start or missed frame to the thread, allocation, boundary or state transition behind it.

Perfetto · ATrace · Runtime diagnostics

Systems exploration

Moving closer to the platform through process boundaries, native domain logic, AOSP exploration and modern C++.

Binder / AIDL · Rust · AOSP · C++

03 / IN PRODUCTION

Personal curiosity.
Production perspective.

My professional work in automotive media informs the questions I explore in my personal projects.

Explore my experience

ASCENTCORE

Aug 2023 — Present

Senior Android /
AAOS Developer

Automotive media HMI

MediaAutomotivePerformanceFeature ownership

04 / ENGINEERING NOTES

Engineering notes

Practical write-ups on AAOS, Android media, performance and systems boundaries.

3 October 2026

MediaSession and MediaBrowser in an Android Automotive media app

Trace a browser request through PandaWave’s Media3 service and keep Android browse IDs separate from the domain catalog contract.

AAOSMedia3MediaSession

3 October 2026

Debugging rotary and DPAD focus navigation in Android Automotive

Separate input delivery from focus movement, then test the small-delta and direction-change behavior in PandaWave’s Compose rotary path.

AAOSComposeRotary focus

3 October 2026

Diagnosing Android UI jank with Perfetto and ATrace

Connect missed frames to named work in PandaWave’s Android adapter, while keeping startup measurements and emulator results in context.

Android performancePerfettoATrace