Senior Android Engineer

Job description

## Senior Android Engineer **Location:** Hungary (UK candidates also considered) **Contract:** Permanent, full-time ## **About us** Hawk-Eye Innovations is at the forefront of sports technology, delivering officiating, tracking, broadcast and performance solutions across some of the world's biggest sports. As part of Sony Sports, we continue to push the boundaries of innovation, helping athletes, coaches, teams, broadcasters and governing bodies make better decisions through technology. # ## Build technology that changes how sport is experienced What if athletes, coaches and teams could access the kind of tracking technology that has traditionally been out of reach? We’re building a new generation of tracking services for elite and semi-professional sport, creating products that bring powerful technology to the people who need it most. We’re looking for a **Senior Android Engineer** to take ownership of the mobile application at the heart of this experience. You’ll join a small, cross-functional engineering team building something new, with the opportunity to shape the architecture, influence technical decisions and see your work make a tangible difference. We work with a high degree of autonomy and embrace AI-augmented development to help us build and iterate at pace. ## The role You’ll own the Android application from architecture and implementation through to release and ongoing reliability. It’s the part of the product that athletes, coaches and teams interact with directly - the application that captures data, coordinates devices, manages sessions and transfers information back to the wider system. The challenge is making all of this work reliably in the real world. Our products are often set up and operated by users who have never used them before. They may be working on unreliable internet connections, managing multiple devices and operating in environments we cannot control. That means intuitive setup, clear feedback, resilient data transfer and graceful recovery from failures are fundamental to the product, not features to add later. You’ll work across the full Android stack, from camera capture and local storage to device-to-device communication, background processing and release management. You’ll also integrate native C++ components developed by our computer vision engineers, helping bring advanced tracking capabilities into a dependable mobile experience. This is a role for an engineer who enjoys owning complex problems end to end, making thoughtful architectural decisions and building software that works beyond the ideal conditions of a development environment. ## What you’ll be doing - **Own the Android application:** Lead the design, architecture and implementation of a production-ready mobile application, taking responsibility for quality, maintainability and performance. - **Build the capture experience:** Develop and maintain the camera and media capture layer, including camera configuration, session management, recording and local storage. - **Coordinate connected devices:** Build the mechanisms that allow multiple devices and on-site edge units to operate as a single system, including communication, setup, synchronisation, shared state and recovery when connections fail. - **Make unreliable networks manageable:** Design robust data and media transfer, with prioritisation, queuing, retries and partial-failure handling built into the application. - **Integrate native components:** Connect C++ computer vision components through the Android NDK and JNI, owning the Android application functionality and integration around them. - **Own the release lifecycle:** Manage releases across environments, including Google Play submissions, internal testing tracks, remote configuration and release signing. - **Build for reliability in the field:** Implement crash reporting, diagnostics and observability so that issues can be understood and resolved without someone needing to be physically present. - **Design for real devices:** Account for battery consumption, thermal behaviour, background execution restrictions, permissions and differences across Android versions and device types. - **Collaborate across disciplines:** Work closely with backend, design and computer vision engineers, managing dependencies and ensuring the application integrates effectively with the wider system. - **Maintain high engineering standards:** Write testable, maintainable code that other engineers can understand, extend and confidently build upon. - **Help the team deliver:** Contribute to planning, estimation and task breakdown, identifying risks and dependencies early. - **Build with AI:** Use AI-assisted and delegated development tools as a standard part of your workflow, within our security and intellectual property guidelines. As the team grows, there may also be opportunities to mentor other engineers, take technical leadership of mobile development and establish the standards and practices that shape the discipline. ## What you’ll bring You’re an experienced Android engineer who enjoys taking ownership of an application from the first architectural decisions through to production release. You understand that great mobile engineering is about more than functionality. It’s about building an experience that remains reliable when devices behave differently, networks drop out and users encounter situations you couldn’t have anticipated. You’re comfortable working independently, making sound technical decisions and collaborating with engineers outside your specialism. You take pride in delivering production-quality software and are motivated by solving practical problems that have a direct impact on users. You’ll ideally bring: - At least **4 years of mobile application development experience**, including substantial delivery of native Android applications using Kotlin. - A portfolio of applications shipped and available on Google Play. - Experience taking applications through the full development lifecycle, from project creation and architecture to release signing and store approval. - A degree in a software-related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience. - A willingness to learn new technologies, tools and platforms. ## Technical skills **You’ll have expert-level knowledge of:** - Native Android development using Kotlin. - Device-to-device communication and data serialisation, including technologies such as Wi-Fi Direct and Protocol Buffers. - Mobile camera and media systems, including capture pipelines, codecs and local storage management. - Building resilient applications for unreliable networks, including background transfers, queuing, retries and partial-failure handling. **You’ll also be comfortable with:** - Mobile CI/CD and automated release pipelines. - Writing unit and integration tests. - Git, code management and code review practices. - Task and ticket management tools such as Jira. - Mobile application architecture and design. - Android device lifecycle constraints, including thermal behaviour, battery usage, background execution limits, permissions and differences across OS versions and device tiers. - Web service integration and API contracts. **It would be beneficial to understand:** - Real-time and latency-sensitive data delivery. - Integrating native computer vision or machine learning components into an Android application. - Coordinating multiple devices as part of a single system. - Kotlin Multiplatform and its potential as a future route to iOS. You don’t need to have worked with every technology listed. We’re interested in strong native Android fundamentals, sound engineering judgement and the ability to learn and solve unfamiliar problems. ## Our technology Our stack includes Kotlin, C++ using the Android NDK and JNI, Protocol Buffers, REST and WebSocket APIs, AWS, Git, GitHub Actions and Jira. ## Why Hawk-Eye? At Hawk-Eye, you'll have the opportunity to work on technology used across the world's leading sports while solving complex technical challenges alongside talented engineers and product teams. You'll play a key role in shaping products from the ground up, working in an environment that values innovation, collaboration and continuous learning. If you're excited by the opportunity to build cutting-edge mobile products that make a genuine impact in sport, we'd love to hear from you. **Hungary Benefits** - Annual Leave: Standard according to local labour law - Flexible Working: Hybrid model (2 days in our office per week) - Access to sporting events and tickets - Sony Group Company Discounts - Other Benefits: Cafeteria options (SZÉP Card, Nursery & Kindergarten contributions, Annual MOL Bubi Pass), Private Medical Insurance, Life & Accident Insurance, MindentMent Dental Clinic discounts, Seniority Awards, Employee Assistance Program