Oura Tech Talents: Meet Android Engineer, Tugberk

Oura is built by talented professionals from around the world with the aim of helping millions of people improve their sleep, recovery, and activity. At Oura, we work in cross-functional squads to ensure we have the right talent to create new features, and add value to the Oura experience.?

Get to know some of our tech talents, their life stories, and their role in building the technology behind Oura.

Meet Android Engineer, Tugberk

Hi, my name is Tugberk, Tubi for short. I’m from Turkey, and I joined Oura in March 2021 as a Senior Android Engineer. I first came to Finland to get my Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering at Aalto University, and I got my Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering in Turkey. Neither of my degrees were in software, but I chose to study engineering in the first place, as I was quite interested in computers. I didn’t do any coding, but a big interest was there, and the high school I went to was focused on different sciences, so it seemed like a natural fit for me. In my last year of Bachelor studies, I was working in a military electronics company, and my interests towards software development grew. I also did some software testing in my early career for a short time, which pushed me further into the software engineering world before switching to that in 2014.?

I have always been fascinated by things that I can have a direct impact on and that I can see or use with my own hands. Although my Bachelor’s was in Electrical Engineering, I realized I loved software development more and I directed my career towards that by studying to become an embedded developer. It seemed the most natural path to stay close to the hardware side due to my background.

Building Wearables and User Interfaces

I had the opportunity to join Suunto, a Finnish world-renowned wearable watch company, and started on middleware. There, I had the opportunity to work on many impactful projects. I was able to work closely with the mobile application teams, which later facilitated my switch to Android development. For me, it is super interesting to work on applications that have a user interface. So, I also started to study mobile and android development, and eventually I was able to move into a role focused on mobile development. During my time at Suunto, first I worked as a C++ developer on middleware, and then as an Android developer on Suunto Android application and Suunto 7 Wear OS watch. I also got to do cross-platform work as well and made two open source libraries, one in flutter and one in reactnative.

When I first started my career as a software developer, I realized it was more interesting for me to build user interfaces. And it was the most accessible way to do something, to build applications for mobile phones, so you can directly relate and interact with them. I started learning Android essentially because I had an Android phone. Once I noticed my own level increasing, I sought opportunities to make a move to the Android development team.

And now I get to do that everyday at Oura.?

Why Oura?

What sparked my interest about Oura was the fact it was a growth company that also fulfilled my interest of working in a company where I can combine my hardware and software skills. I was fascinated by the cross-functional team squad model, as in my previous company we had worked in competence domain teams.

I joined just over 8 months ago, and so far I have had the opportunity to work on extremely impactful features. I am on the Health Squad, which focuses on developing features that have a direct impact on people’s health and deals with heart monitoring detection and temperature data.

How I joined is also interesting. It took me 3 hours to decide that this was the company I wanted to work for. The people I talked with at Oura during my recruitment process were super talented, and they were doing very interesting things. For me, it felt like a great match, as I knew the product was also a wearable, like the one I was working on at Suunto.

I also had some ex-colleagues working at Oura, from whom I heard about great things that were happening in Oura and the growing nature of the business. The pandemic boosted the need in people’s lives to have more control over their own health data and lead healthier lives. For me this was another major reason to move to a tech company that is growing with global reach!?

Motivated By Relatability and First-Hand Impact of the Product

It’s super fun and motivating for me to work on and use a product I am creating in my own daily life! It’s also about eating your own dog food. It can taste great but if there are bugs, then you know what you need to do — or will figure out how to fix it. So, the work is very relatable and there is no distance between the product and myself. We get to test, learn, and fix the product — I am also a user, and I benefit from this work myself.

Working in a company like Oura, where I knew that would be possible, was a major driver. For me, it is way more fun that way! What I also like is that it’s not just about seeing the impact and wearing the ring, but it’s also about being able to interact with the mobile application and knowing that what I am building is something tangible that users can see and experience.?

I can see the impact first hand!

Creating Immediate Impact By Working in Oura’s Tech Squads

I joined Oura as an Senior Android Engineer; however, we work in cross-functional teams. How that works is that each team is responsible for different features of the product. We work in six week cycles with a two week cool down period. We have our competence domain groups on Slack separately where we can exchange knowledge and get peer support from other Android engineers.

The team I joined is the Health Squad, and what I really enjoy is the responsibility that has been given to new team members from the get go. Since I started, I have already had the opportunity to create, work on, and launch one feature with my squad — the Nap Detection feature. Another thing I love about the work is that it is technically very challenging, as the user interface is quite complex and building data charts is difficult due to the fact that getting data from the ring and visualising it is not straightforward. One great thing about working on the Nap Detection feature was that I had the opportunity to really do interesting work and learn the codebase at the same time.?

Opportunity to Work on Impactful Projects like the New Gen3 Release

Most of my time, since I joined Oura, has been spent on another new feature — the long awaited 24/7 heart rate monitoring feature, which will be key in our newly launched Oura Gen3 ring model. This feature will allow for daytime heart rate monitoring. What is really amazing is that this is the biggest new feature release coming for this launch, and it is very rewarding to be able to work on such a big and important feature as a complete newbie to the company!

In many companies, you might get some work to warm you up, but at Oura you will jump into the deep end of doing meaningful real business critical features right away! This definitely gives the feeling that you can make an immediate impact. This might not continue forever, but at the moment we have so much to do that jumping right in is what is needed. So, if that sounds interesting to you as a technical person, then I would take a look at our open roles!

Check out our open tech positions and stay tuned for Tubi's second blog about his day to day work as an Android Engineer at Oura!

Want to join Tubi as an Android Engineer at Oura? Join our Oura Tech team as a Senior Android Engineer or send an open application for our Apps team as an Android developer.