Android Development

Responsibilities

• Own the Player: Design, build, and maintain our core video playback experience using Jetpack Media3
• Optimise for Speed: Obsess over playback performance. Your primary goals are to minimise startup latency (Time-to-Render) and eliminate buffering.
• Build for the Feed: Implement and fine-tune advanced preloading, pre-fetching, and caching strategies (e. g., SimpleCache) to ensure instant video playback as the user scrolls through the feed.
• Adaptive Streaming: Master Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming (HLS/DASH) to provide the best possible quality based on fluctuating network conditions (e. g., 4G, 5G, public Wi-Fi).
• Customisation and UI: Build and customise reusable PlayerView components (or Jetpack Compose equivalents) that integrate seamlessly into our UI, handling gestures, muted autoplay, and UI transitions.
• Robustness: Implement comprehensive error handling and retry logic. If playback fails, you'll know why and how to recover gracefully.
• Analytics: Integrate and manage playback analytics to track key metrics like buffering rates, startup time, error codes, and user engagement.
• Lifecycle Management: Ensure flawless player lifecycle management to prevent memory leaks, manage audio focus, and control battery/data consumption.
• Collaboration: Work closely with backend and media-pipeline teams to define video encoding profiles, compression, and CDN strategies.
  

Requirements

• Experience: 4+ years of professional Android development (Kotlin is a must).
• Core Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with Media3 / ExoPlayer. You should be able to discuss its architecture, customisation points, and performance tuning.
• Domain Knowledge: Proven experience in building or optimising video streaming applications (e. g., OTT, short-form video, or video-on-demand).
• Strong understanding of video streaming protocols (HLS, DASH).
• Experience with media caching strategies and libraries.
• Solid grasp of Android's component lifecycle, concurrency, and performance profiling tools (e. g., Android Profiler).
• Familiarity with building complex, feed-based UIs (RecyclerView / Jetpack Compose).
• Problem Solver: An analytical mindset, with the ability to debug complex issues across the app, network, and media stack.