Software Engineer, Android

About SmartNews

News should be for everyone. But not when it’s buried under cat videos—or when your internet is spotty—or when it’s in a filter bubble. That’s why we created SmartNews.

Our mission is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. To accomplish this:

We are a machine learning company. News should be impartial, trending and trustworthy. Our algorithms evaluate millions of articles, social signals and human interactions to deliver the top 0.01% of stories that matter most, right now.

We love content. News should be sustainable. We support quality journalism and respect publishers by sharing article traffic and revenue.

Please note that we will only consider you for one application at a time.

Position

Mission 

SmartNews is a technology company driven by our mission of delivering the world's quality information to those who need it. Our leading mobile news app has tens of millions of monthly active users in Japan and the US. Our goal is to grow SmartNews into a top global product, delivering quality information that supports millions worldwide.

To accomplish this, we are looking for mobile developers capable of developing state-of-the-art Android mobile applications that are smart, engaging, and user-friendly for our users while contributing to our aggressive business growth.

Culture 

Our engineers come from a variety of backgrounds from large, well-established companies to small ventures. We believe that employees with diverse sets of skills working together make for strong, cohesive teams.

Visit our People page to see interviews of our engineering leaders!

Responsibilities

As an Android Engineer, you will:

• Lead the design, execution, and performance optimization of an Android application used by tens of millions of users
• Closely collaborate with global cross-functional teams (product managers, designers, data scientists, backend engineers, etc.) to build new mobile product features
• Optimize mobile platform with the latest Android and Kotlin technology to improve user experience and mobile engineering productivity
• Analyze and optimize UI and backend application code for efficiency and performance
• Rapid prototype development to visualize impactful product for the user and the business
• Proactive, innovative, creative technical problem solving with a focus on metrics

Technologies We Use

• Languages: Java, Kotlin
• Libraries: Firebase, OKHTTP, ExoPlayer, Lottie, Coil, Timber, Jackson, detekt
• Tools: GitHub, Slack, CirecleCI
• Issue Management: JIRA
• Document Management: Notion

Teams and Their Functions

Mobile Foundation
Provide a positive engineering experience for application software engineers by building a scalable mobile foundation.

JP Activation
Provide fantastic onboarding experience and collect more user signals that unlock the full value of SmartNews.

Ads Mobile
Contribute to business growth by developing advertisement features for the Japanese and the US market with reliable and efficient code.

News Mobile
Deliver great and relevant news to our users. Working on the content delivery and content ranking in the news feed which is the core of SmartNews mission.

Top Card
Drive user engagement by giving users the power to explore inspiration, reveal relevant information, and stay up-to-date to their interest with our content offering.

Your qualification

• 3-5+ years of experience with Android application development
• Experience with coding in both Kotlin and Java
• Experience building maintainable and testable code bases, including API design, and unit testing techniques
• Experience with multithreading programming and mobile memory management
• Business level communication in English

Will be a plus

• Experience developing Android applications from start to finish
• Experience with other programming languages
• Experience with mobile CI/CD, ideally on a customized cloud setup
• Experience with Android performance tools
• Experience with applying unified architectures in a large-scale mobile project
• Familiar with design patterns and architecture design (e.g. UML)
• Experience working with cross-functional teams

What we offer

• Support program for employees’ self-development and well-being
• Healthy lunches are prepared on-site daily in our SmartKitchen, located in our West Office building. You can even see the cooks at work!
• Need a pick-me-up? Stop by ChikyuCoffee, our in-house coffee shop located in both the East and West Office buildings, and get a cup of gourmet coffee, espresso-based beverage, or other seasonal drink!
• SmartNews provides all healthcare and social insurance benefits required by Japanese labor law