About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Tech Lead, Android Core Product based in South Africa.
Responsibilities
- Own major Android features end-to-end, partnering closely with Product and Design to define, build, test, and deliver high-quality experiences that delight users.
- Help shape the future direction of the Android engineering team by contributing strong technical leadership, architectural thinking, and product-focused decision-making.
- Own, monitor, maintain, and continuously improve reliability metrics for key product features, proactively identifying and addressing technical risks.
- Collaborate across Product, Design, Engineering, and QA to align technical solutions with user needs and broader product objectives.
- Review pull requests, provide constructive technical feedback, and support teammates in maintaining high engineering standards.
- Take ownership of critical incidents and unexpected technical challenges, responding quickly and driving issues through to resolution.
- Manage feature releases and provide nightly builds to the QA team, ensuring new functionality is thoroughly tested and delivered with a high level of quality.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including hands-on experience developing or contributing significantly to Android applications.
- Strong familiarity with Android components and proven experience building production-quality Android applications.
- Excellent hands-on expertise with Kotlin and modern Android development technologies, including Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Jetpack Navigation, Dagger 2, Room, Jetpack Compose, custom views, Canvas and Paint.
- Strong understanding of software architecture and development patterns, particularly MVVM and Clean Architecture, as well as experience with background services, music player services, Android animations, and JUnit testing.
- A strong understanding of testing principles and the ability to design and implement effective automated tests that support application reliability and maintainability.
- Product design intuition and genuine empathy for users, with the ability to make thoughtful technical and UX decisions that improve the overall product experience.
- A proactive mindset and willingness to improve the application and codebase beyond the minimum requirements defined in a specification.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, combined with a user-oriented approach to problem solving and a strong drive for continuous improvement through feedback.
- Experience contributing to Android open-source projects is a plus, as is familiarity with iOS, Web, or Node.js development.
Conditions
- Competitive salary, with the U.S.-based equivalent range listed at $140,000–$200,000 USD per year, plus bonus and stock depending on experience.
- An opportunity to join a fast-growing environment where you can directly influence product and technical direction.
- A highly entrepreneurial culture that values initiative, intuition, calculated risk-taking, and strong execution.
- A hands-off management approach that provides significant autonomy and allows you to focus on delivering your best work.
- The opportunity to work on a transformative product used by millions of people around the world.
- The chance to build technology that supports people with learning differences and accessibility needs, including dyslexia, ADD, low vision, concussions, and autism.
- A friendly, laid-back working environment with a strong commitment to asynchronous collaboration across a fully distributed team.
- The opportunity to work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and audio, one of the fastest-growing areas of technology.