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    Opening: Sr. Android Developer

    Hey. We need help!

    Fast growth, mission-driven startup in need of Senior Android Engineer in Austin, Texas.

     

    Pinwheel is a mission-driven startup in Austin, TX working on the first mobile operating system & smartphone purpose-built to foster healthy life-long tech habits in kids. We love technology and believe it should serve humans rather than own them. Pinwheel has been developed by therapists, technologists, and parents on a mission to promote social and emotional health in a world saturated by technology that tends to monetize attention—the most valuable gift we humans have to give.

     

    Pinwheel is seeking a full-time Android developer (primarily Kotlin) that thrives in taking ownership and is glad to work with a scrappy global team. (P.S. This entire description was written by Isaiah McPeak, Dane Witbeck, and Greta Crockett, not someone in HR—it means what it says, every word!)

    At a Glance

    What You'll Get

    • Experience of a lifetime. We're blasting through seed stage and on our way to growth stage. It's really happening. Ask about our traction. We believe this can be a career-defining job.
    • Employee equity. It's still early enough to participate in the employee stock options pool.
    • Latitude. We don't write essays to each other on the product team. We identify business goals, ensure developers understand them, and invite developers to the creative and ideation processes. Plan to get to use your full brain!

    What you will own

    • Lead new projects, R&D endeavors
    • Development and support of Pinwheel’s Android applications
    • Ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of the applications
    • Collaborate with multiple teams to define, design, and ship new features and enhancements
    • Identify and correct performance bottlenecks and bugs
    • Help maintain code quality, organization, and team collaboration
    • Discover, evaluate, and implement new technologies
    • Continuously evaluate and improve internal processes
    • Create, evaluate, maintain, and optimize internal coding standards & best practices

    Expectations in the First 90 Days

    1. Take Ownership of the Android Code Base – Ownership is our core company value. It means that the mission is the boss and you own your work's connection to the mission. We have several apps (messages, desktop/OS, dialer, wallet, etc) and need clear ownership for their business outcome, in partnership with product management and marketing. You’ll go through our existing custom Android ROM and map out the architecture with the help of the current Android developer has been part-time. You’ll learn our backend data model and come to understand our use-case and what customers are demanding.
    2. Help Plan 2021 – Our dreams our bigger than our capacity right now. You will help us identify our capacity and sequence a big year of problem-solving and innovation.
    3. Love our Customers – Everyone at Pinwheel needs to spend time in Customer Care seeing what it's like to be a customer. You'll become a product expert and be able to describe customer segments, points of view, and challenges.
    4. Make a Great Core Team Member – You’ll create a strong communication bond between the Product Lead to make sure we’re building the right things in the right priority.
    5. You'll Make your Stamp as a Maker – You’ll write new code to meet our users most needed features. You’ll squash bugs when needed! You’ll live and breathe the user experience for kids on Android, and feel personally responsible when they have any sub-optimal experience!

    About You

    Experience and Qualities

    • You're senior enough a developer to take ownership in Java, Kotlin, and the Android platform, with customizations deep inside of Android plus management of multiple, interconnected apps.
    • Be confident you can jump in and call GraphQL api’s as well as understand the existing simple app and the needs of the customer.
    • You should be an owner, see what needs to be done and do it. Proactive and performance driven, always striving to unblock yourself and not afraid to ask/tell others what you need to get the job done you’ve been asked to do.
    • Able to focus on incremental improvement, fixing one thing at a time instead of refactoring/rearchitecting entire code bases just to be effective.
    • Strong with architecture and design modeling.
    • Strong sense of artisan pride to get things done & done right!

     

    Here’s what we think will make for a great fit! Do these sound like you?

    • You're committed to having a positive impact both in the work you do and the good it does in the world.
    • You’ve started things before on your own initiative, and can point to some pretty “out there” things you’ve done to hustle your way to where you needed to go.
    • You value humility in yourself and your co-workers (please no political games!)
    • You love to learn new things and have a track record of trying new tools and learning them until becoming proficient.
    • COVID-Note: This is not a remote job. The role deals with phones, which we prep and ship from Austin. There can be hundreds of phones "soaking" software updates nearby at any given moment. It includes lots of testing and many steps with physical phones, so there is quite a bit of in-person work.

     

    Some nice-to-haves...

    • You’ve worked or volunteered with elementary-school aged kids or their parents and have an interest and perspective on what makes them tick.
    • You have a unique and interesting story personally with your own viewpoint of the world. We'd like to learn about that.
    • You’ve built partnerships between software companies previously. Especially if you have worked in the Android ecosystem speaking with app developers.

    Apply via email:isaiah@pinwheel.com