Senior Software Engineer - Connected Surfaces

About the role

Kuku is India's one of the largest content platforms. Our listeners don't just consume content on their phones, they listen in the car, on their wrist, on the big screen in the living room, and on the tablet. This role owns those surfaces.

What you'll do

• Build and own Kuku's Android experience across Android Automotive OS / Android Auto, Wear OS, Android TV
• Design adaptive, responsive UI that feels native to each surface, leanback navigation on TV, glanceable tiles and complications on the watch, driver-safe media UI in the car, and multi-pane layouts on tablets.
• Own the media and playback layer across surfaces: background playback, media sessions, notifications, offline/download behaviour, and handoff between devices.
• Make sure a feature shipped once behaves correctly everywhere, rather than forking into four half-maintained apps.
• Keep playback smooth and startup fast across a wide range of device capabilities, screen sizes, and OS versions.
• Own crashes, ANRs, and playback issues on these surfaces end to end, from the alert to the fix to making sure it can't happen again.
• Build with observability in mind so problems on a car head-unit or a TV are visible before users report them.
• Work with design, backend, and content teams to define how each surface should look and behave.

What they're looking for

• 3, 6 years of Android engineering with real production apps, not just side projects.
• Strong Kotlin (and comfort with Java where needed) and solid command of the modern Android stack, Jetpack, coroutines, and Jetpack Compose.
• Hands-on experience with media playback, Media3 / ExoPlayer, MediaSession, background playback, and audio focus.
• Experience shipping to at least one non-phone form factor (Automotive, Wear OS, Android TV, or tablet/large-screen), and the instinct to build adaptive UI rather than phone-only screens.
• A little bit of iOS, enough to read Swift, reason about parity, and collaborate meaningfully with the iOS team.
• Basic backend fluency, you can read and reason about REST APIs, debug an integration, and hold a sensible conversation about the contract you depend on.
• You can pick up an unfamiliar surface, understand its constraints, and ship it safely.

Nice to have

• Experience with Android Automotive OS and the media app model for cars.
• Experience with Wear OS, tiles, complications, and on-watch playback.
• Experience with Android TV / Leanback.
• Depth in Jetpack Compose across form factors, including adaptive and large-screen layouts.
• Familiarity with basic backend work (Python / Django, or similar) beyond just consuming APIs.
• Prior work in a consumer product at real scale.

About Kuku (Kuku TV)