Day-to-Day of an Android Engineer at Oura

Meet Tugberk - Part 2

I’m Tubi for short and I’m a Senior Android Engineer at Oura from Turkey working in Finland. Get to know more about my career journey in Part 1.

My day to day work is essentially building features for the Android application with the rest of the Health Squad. Our squad focuses on developing features that have a direct impact on people’s health and deals with heart rate monitoring detection, temperature data, as well as sleep monitoring. I work closely with other devs, designers and product owners to develop the new features.

There is a lot of ‘learning by doing’ happening everyday, as the work that we do is technically challenging in the Android domain due to the fact that what we are building is complicated. There is a need for our code to interact with multiple domains. It’s not just fetching data from some service, but actually also interacting with the ring. A lot of complex data is coming in, so this means that there needs to be a really good user interface that promotes using the application, as well as visualizes the user's data in a digestible way. The data that we show needs to be accurate as it relates to people’s health, and they may make life decisions based on it. The quality of our releases need to be extremely high and that’s what motivates us.

User testing by employees to create a faster feedback loop?

One thing that helps our work is that every employee at Oura has at least one Oura ring, which they use in their daily life. This creates a great feedback opportunity for us, as we are able to create a faster feedback loop. This helps us evolve the product very quickly over time as we can catch bugs and fix them fast. Obviously this could be a good and bad thing for a developer with incoming feature requests or bugs, but overall I think it is a positive thing!

Mobile Development and Learning at Oura

The projects for me have been super interesting so far and I have been enjoying it. So working in mobile development at Oura you will get to work on an interesting product and very interesting yet complex features. We also have an impact on the tech stack that we use. There are lots of seniors with many years of experience in both Android, iOS and IoT, so this is a good learning opportunity even for those with a lot of experience already.

What is great about Oura is that if I want to learn something new and change career paths, I have the opportunity to make the change. I have done Android development for many years, but have experience in cross platform work as well, with for example mobile SDK. I’ve also worked in React Native and done some Flutter development. I find native iOS development interesting too, and I can see myself doing that later in the future as well. I definitely don’t see myself doing Android forever.

Teams at Oura are quite fluid and flexible, if someone wants to do both Android and iOs it is possible, but there is also no need to touch iOS if you don’t want to. There is a clear benefit at Oura though if you can read iOS as an Android Engineer as it helps us create cohesion between the iOS app and the Android applications.

Our Tech Culture: Self-Starters, Supportive & Open to Ideas

At Oura, people are very open to help each other. Our tech culture is based on people who care about the features they are creating, end to end. Our people share a curious and optimistic but solution-oriented mindset.

We are definitely a self-starter culture. We are in a growth phase where you need to be a proactive and find information for yourself. So asking around, especially from people in your domain or squad is the easiest way - and you'll usually find your answer! ?

We work in cross functional teams, which is different from domain based teams like Android teams. So, we work mostly together with people from different disciplines. But of course we need to interact with other people in the same discipline, as we work on the same code base and need to have some structure in place. Also keeping our own competence community of Android engineers is important when for example onboarding new team members.?

Looking for people to strengthen Oura's Android capabilities

Within the Android domain we don’t work together to create a feature, but we work together to improve the codebase and every six weeks we have a two week cool down period. During that time, we can decide what we want to do - whether it be refactoring or trying new technologies (of course the new tech needs to be mature enough to use in our production applications, but we’re very open to trying new things). There is always room for innovation and not just one way to do things. Our tech community is flexible to diverse perspectives and everyone can contribute and influence the code base.?

If you’re, like me, a team player and a person who is open to new ideas and ways of doing things, as well as excited and motivated to work on a complex codebase and system that interacts with many different components - then Oura could be a great place as part of your career journey. Let’s work together - it'll be fun!

Currently looking for: Senior Android Engineer & Android App Engineering

Get to know more about our values at Oura and check out our open Android and other tech careers!