Team Lead, Android Core Product

Accountabilities: End-to-End Feature Ownership: Lead the design, development, and release of major Android product features, collaborating closely with the Design team and remaining actively involved in implementation. Hands-On Engineering: Write production code, review pull requests, make technical decisions, and maintain ownership of significant areas of the application. Technical Leadership: Establish engineering direction, guide architectural decisions, and identify opportunities to consolidate duplicated solutions into shared, reusable components. Code Quality and Maintainability: Maintain shared code and infrastructure that are well-tested, clearly documented, reliable, and easy for other engineers to understand and extend. Team Enablement: Identify blockers, work directly with engineers to resolve difficult problems, and help the team make progress on complex technical challenges. Reliability and Performance: Own and improve reliability metrics for key features, investigate recurring issues, and implement underlying changes that prevent problems from happening again. Testing and Verification: Strengthen automated testing and shift verification earlier in the development process so that nightly builds delivered to QA provide confirmation of quality rather than revealing fundamental issues for the first time. Release Management: Own feature releases, handle critical issues, provide nightly builds for QA, and reduce the amount of manual intervention required to deliver reliable releases. Engineering Standards and Reviews: Define appropriate review and approval practices based on technical risk, ensuring that critical changes receive sufficient scrutiny while straightforward work can move efficiently. Planning and Prioritization: Lead team planning activities, direct attention toward unresolved decisions and high-impact work, and improve how engineering time and resources are allocated. Process Improvement: Identify when existing workflows need to change, guide the adoption of improved practices, and address team feedback and skepticism constructively. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Participate in discussions across Product, Design, and Engineering, ensuring technical constraints and implementation considerations are understood early. Mentorship and Development: Support early-career engineers by assigning meaningful work, providing actionable feedback, and creating opportunities for learning and professional growth. AI-Assisted Development: Help establish effective team practices for working with AI agents and identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity and development quality. Requirements: Professional Experience: At least five years of software engineering experience, including experience leading a team or owning a major product area while remaining hands-on. Advanced Android Development: Strong proficiency in Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, background services, music player services, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit testing. Background Processing: Experience shipping and maintaining background audio functionality or other long-running background processes. Testing and Quality Assurance: Strong understanding of software testing principles, how to design effective tests, and the limitations of automated testing. Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to guide technical decisions, unblock engineers, improve team practices, and lead significant product development initiatives. Process Improvement Experience: Evidence of introducing engineering practices, tools, or shared solutions that a team continued using independently, along with an understanding of the effort and trade-offs involved in adoption. Change Management: Comfort challenging existing ways of working, communicating the rationale for change, and navigating the friction that can accompany process improvements. Code Review Judgment: Ability to determine the appropriate level of review and oversight for different types of changes based on system behavior, complexity, and risk. Reusable Engineering Solutions: Experience building tools, components, or infrastructure that improve productivity and are adopted by other engineers across the team. AI Development Workflows: Ability to explain how a team can effectively work with AI agents, beyond individual use of AI-powered tools. Product and Design Sensibility: Strong product intuition, user empathy, and an interest in improving Android UI and UX beyond the minimum stated requirements. Initiative and Ownership: A proactive approach to improving application quality, engineering practices, and codebase health without waiting for explicit instructions. Communication Skills: Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions, provide constructive feedback, and collaborate effectively across functions. Additional Experience: Contributions to open-source Android projects are a plus. Experience with iOS, web development, or Node.js is also beneficial. Benefits: Annual Salary: Base salary ranging from $140,000 to $200,000, depending on experience. Additional Compensation: Eligibility for bonuses and stock-based compensation. Work Arrangement: Fully remote position within the United States. Distributed Team Environment: Opportunity to work with a globally distributed team of engineers, AI researchers, and product specialists. Technical Ownership: A hands-on leadership role with meaningful influence over product architecture, engineering practices, and feature delivery. Professional Growth: Opportunities to mentor engineers, shape technical standards, and develop leadership skills while continuing to write production code. Interview Process: Several technical interviews and an assessment using a real codebase, with the process designed to be completed within approximately one week. Practical Technical Assessment: Opportunity to use familiar development tools and explain your reasoning, trade-offs, and technical decisions during the assessment.a