Philo: TV on the Internet (TVoIP)

At Philo, we’re a group of technology and product people who set out to build the future of television, marrying the best in modern technology with the most compelling medium ever invented – in short, we’re building the TV experience that we’ve always wanted for ourselves. In practice this means leveraging cloud delivery, modern tech stacks, machine learning, and hand-crafted native app experiences on all of our platforms. We aim to deliver a rock solid experience on the streaming basics, while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback experiences.

Android at Philo

The Android team at Philo is responsible for building our product experience on four different platforms from one codebase – Android Mobile, Android TV, Amazon Fire Tablets, and Amazon FireTV. We’re a small autonomous team building apps with high engagement and millions of installs, which collectively are responsible for a huge fraction of the billions of minutes watched on Philo each year. We are passionate about crafting the best possible UX to connect our users with the content they love, providing a seamless viewing experience while surprising them with new features and capabilities.

Recent projects on our Android platform have included:

• Leading development of our Philo Connect feature, a cross-platform second-screen experience that lets you fully control your large screen (“Ten foot”) viewing experience from your smartphone, maintaining a synchronized playback session that lets you browse for new content while controlling your current content playback. This technology is also the building block for upcoming co-viewing features.
• Building a generic focus management framework that we think simplifies a lot of the gaps in system focus, and is much lighter-weight than leanback’s GridView. It is a set of custom views that delegate focusSearch and onRequestFocusInDescendants. We hope to open source this library very soon!
• Starting to build out Kotlin Multi Platform libraries to share code between our iOS and Android apps.
• Developing our own lightweight MVI framework that we built on top of RX, which we are now starting to port over to coroutines.

Philo engineers own what they build from start to finish and are passionate about continuously delivering delightful features to a huge user base. If you’re an Android hacker who cares deeply about writing quality code, using the latest tools & technologies to push the envelope of what’s possible on the platform across a variety of form factors and viewing experiences, we would love to talk to you!

A strong candidate is:

• Extremely proficient in Kotlin
• Familiar with the Android ecosystem, including feature sets and best practices across devices and operating system versions
• Experienced with reactive programming and/or coroutines

Nice to have:

• Experience with video playback
• Experience with or interest in Android based set-top box platforms (Fire TV, Android TV, etc)
• Experience with GraphQL-based APIs
• Experience with TV Integration Framework
• Experience with cross device interoperability (e.g. casting)
• Experience building multi-modal experiences

More about Philo

We strive to build engaging and easy to use streaming apps across a large number of platforms (Android Mobile, Android tablets, Android TV, Amazon FireTV, Roku, iOS, Apple TV, and web), while delivering a large variety of content to our users.

Today there are over 60 channels included in our basic package — our lineup includes many popular cable networks, like A&E, Accuweather, Animal Planet, AXS TV, BBC America, BET, Cheddar, ComedyCentral, CMT, Discovery Channel, Food Network, Game Show Network, Hallmark, HGTV, IFC, INSP,Lifetime, MTV, Newsy, Nickelodeon, OWN, Paramount Network, Sundance, TV One, Vice and VH1. We also offer premium add-on channels from Starz and Epix, and we’re always adding more content!

We’re a company that puts people first – both our subscribers and our team. At Philo, our philosophy is to empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting each other in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion. We believe in having transparency and openness across all parts of the company. We are committed to diversity and inclusion as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV — we believe that a diverse set of voices and perspectives on our team enables us to innovate faster and create the best experience for our subscribers.

Philo is headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in New York and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes a cofounder of Facebook as well as alums of Meraki and HBO. Philo is backed by NEA and industry partners including Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E.

Status: Full-time
Location: San Francisco, CA; Cambridge, MA; Brooklyn, NY or remote
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $130K-$210K depending on experience and location, company stock options and health benefits.

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• Flexible working hours
• Generous paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• $2000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
• $5000 annually for professional development and educational assistance
• $500 “TV stipend” for new employees to upgrade their home watching setup
• $1000 annual home office stipend for employees to upgrade their home work setup
• Dog-friendly office
• And much more!

For California Residents: Philo’s CCPA Notice at Collection – Employees, Applicants, Owners, Directors, Officers and Contractors