Balaji Sunku, Developer in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Balaji Sunku

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Android App Developer

Location
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal Member Since
June 9, 2021

Balaji spent half of his 11 years career with MNCs and the other half with startups. He has extensive experience in making apps from scratch, understanding the existing system, and adding features on top of it. He's excited about learning stuff and crafting them together to make MVPs and scale them. Proven skills with native Android in Kotlin, architecture Components, REST APIs with Retrofit, Firebase, RxJava2, Coroutines, background, and foreground services (end to end application development)

Portfolio

Halodoc
Android SDK, Google Maps, Firebase, Kotlin, Clean Architecture, Coroutines...
Wicked Ride Adventure
Android SDK, Android Architecture Components, Firebase, Retrofit, Java...
Ola
Android SDK, Google Maps, Model View Presenter (MVP)...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Android SDK, Retrofit, Android Architecture Components, RoomDB, Java, Dagger 2, Hilt, Clean Architecture, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Pagination

The most amazing...

...things I've made are bike rental app Bounce and Shuttle Driver for bus booking from scratch, led a team of 3-7 people, and scaled Bounce to 1,000,000 users.

Work Experience

Software Development Engineer III

2020 - PRESENT
Halodoc
  • Developed the insurance linking feature for the health care product and made the benefits available to redeem on multiple services provided by the service.
  • Understood the existing system with high-level knowledge transfer and able to extend the functionalities on time.
  • Collaborated with several teams, including design, product, and tech to resolve dependencies and achieved the app deployments as per the committed deadlines.
Technologies: Android SDK, Google Maps, Firebase, Kotlin, Clean Architecture, Coroutines, Android Architecture Components

Lead Android Engineer

2019 - 2020
Wicked Ride Adventure
  • Developed a keyless bike rental service app from scratch by accommodating other business types provided by the company, such as carpool, auto, and keyed bike service. Led a team of three to seven people and the app used by a million daily active users.
  • Followed up actively to identify and fix the product issues and crashes by Crashlytics and Firebase performance monitoring. Achieved 99.5% crash-free user rate in four weeks.
  • Spent less than eight weeks launching the app on the beta channel and achieved the stable product in another four weeks.
Technologies: Android SDK, Android Architecture Components, Firebase, Retrofit, Java, Clean Architecture

Software Development Engineer II

2015 - 2019
Ola
  • Increased the usage of the app from less than 5% to 98% of the users by handling the stability issues and increased the crash-free users to 99.5%.
  • Managed to convince the senior technical managers and the investors to make a new plan for the app development which lead to amazing results.
  • Worked as a single developer for the Ola Lite Android application with less than 550KB of APK size.
  • Collaborated with multiple teams (of up to 30 people) to develop a food ordering app called Foodpanda and shipped features in a super-fast pace environment.
  • Developed generic tools like event processing and Auth, which were used across the organization for multiple products.
Technologies: Android SDK, Google Maps, Model View Presenter (MVP), Model View ViewModel (MVVM), QR Codes, App Development

Lead Engineer

2012 - 2015
Samsung
  • Won two Spot Awards for the contributions done towards ChatOnV and TizenForum OAuth implementation.
  • Worked on Samsung Galaxy Gear on the implementation of ChatOn's Gear version by creating the entire persistent layer and the user interface.
  • Utilized the WebRTC framework and came up with a new video calling application called ChatOnV India.
  • Worked on ChatOnV application for several devices and user interface designs. Made reusable code to support multiple designs of the same app.
Technologies: Android SDK, MVC Design, WebRTC, SIP, OAuth 2, VoIP

Software Engineer

2011 - 2012
Motorola Mobility
  • Worked on a unique fitness tracking smartwatch called MotoACTV and developed an app as part of the operating system.
  • Implemented the communication between the smartphone and MotoACTV to transfer user notifications over Bluetooth.
  • Created the user interface for the received notifications on MotoACTV.
Technologies: Android SDK, Bluetooth, User Interface (UI), Git

Junior Game Programmer

2010 - 2011
Gameloft
  • Worked on copping down the full versions of the games to demo versions.
  • Ported 2D games from J2ME to Android and did this for a few games like Brain challenge 3, Prince of Persia, and UNO.
  • Stood in the top three positions of the company to port more games from J2ME to Android in the year.
Technologies: J2ME, Android SDK, Java, Subversion (SVN)

Bounce Keyless Bike Service

Made an app from scratch by accommodating multiple business types offered by the company and lead a team of four to seven people.

The app had one million daily active users, making 100,000 completed bookings per day.

Created an impact on the company's overall business by making a smooth way to plugin multiple business types.

Shuttle Driver

Increased the app usage from 5% to 98% by stabilizing the app and enabled the business to have a detailed understanding of the business on the ground.

Taken the entire ownership on the app to convince the respective leadership to make a new project plan for the developments and succeeded by recording 98% of the daily bookings to go through the application.

Musical Alarm with Bluetooth (Open Source)

An alarm clock application to connect to the Bluetooth speakers automatically and play a bunch of music tracks based on the configuration. It disconnects after the playback completion, allowing other Bluetooth devices to access the speakers.

The app is implemented for Android devices, and we're planning to open-source for contributions to implement an efficient user interface and common functionalities of a music player.

Telugu Stories

Developed an app to publish the stories by reusing the ready-made services available in the market. Serving dynamic content to the users without implementing back-end services for the same.

Spent as little as 30 hours to get the app up and running with the Google login, story browsing, and user comments.
2005 - 2009

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Sri Sai Institute of Technology and Science (JNTU) - Rayachoty, India

Libraries/APIs

Retrofit, Android Architecture Components, Google Maps, WebRTC

Tools

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Git, Subversion (SVN), Firebase Authentication, CircleCI

Frameworks

Android SDK, Dagger 2, OAuth 2, Media Players

Languages

Java, Kotlin

Paradigms

Clean Architecture, Model View Presenter (MVP), Model View ViewModel (MVVM), App Development, MVC Design

Storage

RoomDB, Firebase Realtime Database

Platforms

Firebase, J2ME

Other

Pagination, Coroutines, Hilt, Computer Science, Software Development, QR Codes, SIP, VoIP, Bluetooth, User Interface (UI), MVP Design

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