Led Android for a national news app
Leading Android delivery for The Times: UK & World News — Architecture decisions, release quality and roadmap execution with design, product and stakeholders.
Rendering…
~ whoami
kazi
Tech Lead · Lead Android Developer · London
9+ years designing, building and leading delivery of high-quality mobile apps. I take products from architecture to release — Kotlin, Kotlin Multiplatform, Compose and Flutter — and I grow the engineers around me.
► Currently leading Android at The Times — UK & World News
- Years
- 0
- Apps shipped
- 0
- Sectors
- 0
- Based in
- London
- kotlin
- kmp / kmm
- compose
- compose multiplatform
- flutter
- java
- coroutines
- flow
- hilt
- room
- ktor
- retrofit
- rxjava
- mvvm / mvi
- tdd
- espresso
- macrobenchmark
- github actions
- jenkins
- gradle
$ cat tl;dr
Available for new roles
- Looking for
- Tech Lead · Lead / Principal Android
- Location
- London · hybrid or remote
- Right to work
- British citizen — no sponsorship needed
- Core stack
- Kotlin · KMP · Compose · Flutter
- Domains
- News · Banking · Rail · Sport
- Reply time
- Usually within 24 hours
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$ cat achievements.md
Greenfield Kotlin Multiplatform, early adopter
Built shared Android/iOS business logic from an empty codebase for LNER during KMM's early days — tooling, Gradle and platform-bridging patterns agreed with iOS engineers.
Rail & transport ticketing at scale
Apps for GWR, Avanti West Coast, FirstBus and LNER — SSO, journey planning, live train updates, ticket purchase, push and NFC.
Banking features for millions of customers
Built payments, statements, Notification Centre, Cookie Policy and Mortgage Overpayments on Lloyds Bank Mobile, delivered GDPR across Lloyds, BOS and Halifax, and helped ship the new MBNA app after its acquisition.
Flutter fan app for PSG
Loyalty app for Paris Saint-Germain using advanced state management (BLoC, Riverpod, GetX, MobX) with analytics and custom UI.
Raised the engineering bar
Set code quality guidelines, performance budgets and security standards; mentored engineers on clean architecture, TDD and review culture.
$ cat experience.log
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Senior Software Engineer — The Times
Leading Android for The Times: UK & World News — a modular Kotlin codebase with Jetpack Compose, coroutines and Hilt. Full lifecycle ownership: architecture, estimation, code review, release trains, crash and performance monitoring.
- Own architecture decisions and the technical roadmap with product and design.
- Drive release quality — crash-free rates, startup and scroll performance budgets.
- Mentor engineers, run reviews and raise the bar on testing and tooling.
- Build developer-productivity tooling and CI workflows on GitHub Actions.
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Senior Mobile Developer — Future Platforms
Delivery across client teams: GWR, Avanti West Coast, FirstBus, LNER and Paris Saint-Germain.
- Built a train ticketing app from scratch on Kotlin Multiplatform with a shared Kotlin core and native UI per platform.
- Shipped SSO and login, journey planner, live train times, ticket purchase, wallet storage and NFC smartcard reading.
- Implemented push notifications, webviews and analytics; Dagger 2, Secure Preferences and Firebase.
- Flutter loyalty app for PSG using BLoC, Riverpod, GetX and MobX.
- Jenkins CI with JUnit, Mockito and Espresso coverage on every build.
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Android Developer — Lloyds Banking Group
Feature teams on Lloyds Bank Mobile, one of the UK's largest banking apps, across a multi-flavour codebase shared with BOS and Halifax.
- Delivered payments, statements, Notification Centre, Cookie Policy and Mortgage Overpayments.
- Shipped GDPR compliance across the Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps.
- Part of the team that launched the new MBNA app after its acquisition by the group.
- MVP clean architecture with RxJava 2, Dagger 2 and Butterknife.
- Espresso UI tests in Kotlin and JUnit unit tests, verified across FT, QA, UAT and PROD.
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Mobile Developer — Meducation
Feature work on a medical education platform in a team of five engineers.
- Loosely coupled MVP views with injected presenters using Dagger 2 and Butterknife.
- Migrated Realm 1.2 → 3.1.2 and reworked the affected persistence code.
- Parsed and streamed feeds into RecyclerView with RxJava, Retrofit 2 and OkHttp.
- Added PhotoView and Picasso for zoom, multi-touch and double-tap imagery.
- Firebase push for breaking medical news; JUnit and Espresso on Jenkins CI.
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Android Developer — Caffè Nero
Modernised a legacy retail app alongside the UI/UX team.
- Refactored the legacy codebase to MVP with Dagger 2, Butterknife and Mockito under TDD.
- Integrated card.io for fast credit card scanning at payment.
- Replaced Retrofit callback hell with RxJava observable streams for multipart uploads.
- Geocoding via the Fused Location API; GCM and Mixpanel for targeted messaging.
- Crashlytics for real-time crash reporting; Espresso automation for coverage.
$ cat education.txt
- M.Sc. Software Engineering — Aberystwyth University, Wales
- B.E. Information Science & Engineering — HKBK College of Engineering, Bangalore
- Open source — Wear OS / Android wearable projects: PRs, review, triage
$ gh repo list farooqkazi Live from GitHub
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$ cat why-hire-me.md
I lead by building. Architecture reviews, release trains and mentoring matter, but I still write the Kotlin and read the stack traces.
I keep solutions boring on purpose — no clever abstractions nobody can debug six months later. Clean architecture, real tests, healthy builds, crash-free releases.
Banking, rail, sport and national news: regulated, high-traffic products where quality isn't optional.
$ cat hire.me