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. You’ll take Kuku everywhere the listener is, building first-class Android experiences across Automotive, Wear OS, Android TV, and large-screen/tablet, each with its own constraints, interaction model, and playback rules. It’s a role for someone who’s excited by form factors beyond the phone and wants to own how audio behaves on each of them.

What You’ll Work OnMulti-Surface Development

• 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.

Reliability & Performance

• 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.

Cross-Platform Collaboration

• Work with design, backend, and content teams to define how each surface should look and behave.
• Coordinate with the iOS team so experiences stay consistent across platforms.

What We’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.

Good 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.

Preferred Tools & Technologies

• Language: Kotlin (Java where needed)
• UI: Jetpack Compose, Views, adaptive / large-screen layouts
• Media: Media3 / ExoPlayer, MediaSession
• Surfaces: Android Automotive OS / Android Auto, Wear OS, Android TV
• Build & VCS: Gradle, Git

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent — or equivalent practical experience.

What We Offer

• Full ownership of the surfaces that take Kuku FM beyond the phone.
• Competitive comp + ESOPs.
• Learning budget and certification support.
• A team that cares about reliability, not just velocity.

About KUKU Founded in 2018, KUKU is India’s leading storytelling platform, offering a vast digital library of audio stories, short courses, and microdramas. KUKU aims to be India’s largest cultural exporter of stories, culture, and history to the world with a firm belief in “Create In India, Create For The World”.

We deliver immersive entertainment and education through our OTT platforms: Kuku FM, Guru, Kuku TV, and more. With a mission to provide high-quality, personalized stories across genres from entertainment across multiple formats and languages, KUKU continues to push boundaries and redefine India’s entertainment…