Overview

TED is a critically acclaimed, award-winning conference and website featuring inspired talks from the world’s leading thinkers and doers. Since 2006, our talks have been watched more than a billion times worldwide and drawn best-of-breed sponsors. We pride ourselves on combining intelligent, forward-thinking content with leading edge technology and utterly intuitive design. And we’re hiring!

We’re on the search for an experienced Senior Mobile Developer who will be responsible for the development and maintenance of TED’s conference attendee app called TEDConnect (currently available on iOS and Android). Your primary focus will be the development of this app and working on various back-end service integrations with a small team of product / design / engineering professionals tackling different layers of TED’s conference backbone technologies. You must have a portfolio or body of work that you can point to in the app store and be able to elaborate on specific pieces of said app(s).

Engineers can work from anywhere with an internet connection. If you’re in the NYC area, you’re welcome to a desk at our main office in Manhattan. Many of our team members are remote, but we also believe that there is no substitute for periodic in-person meetups. We get together for face-to-face Tech summits about twice per year, in addition to most of us attending at least one TED conference each year.

All engineers are provided new MacBook Pros. Generous health / dental / vision benefits and a company-matched 401K are part of the deal. Every employee also gets a continuing education allowance to use for attending conferences or taking classes.

Our team is passionate about TED’s content and the prospect of creating a stronger platform to enable the exchange of ideas worldwide. We’re endlessly curious. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. And we love to work alongside nice people.

Responsibilities:

  • Design and build applications for the Android platform (and preferably also for iOS)
  • Translate designs and wireframes into high quality code
  • Ensure the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of applications across multiple devices
  • Collaborate with the team to define, design, and ship new features
  • Identify and correct bottlenecks, and fix bugs
  • Help maintain code quality, organization, and automatization

Requirements (Android dev.): 

  • Minimum 4 years experience working in professional media / tech companies.
  • Strong knowledge of Android SDK, different versions of Android, and how to deal with different screen sizes
  • Familiarity with RESTful APIs to connect Android applications to back-end services
  • Strong knowledge of Android UI design principles, patterns, and Material Design best practices
  • Experience with offline storage, threading, variable network connection handling, and performance and memory tuning tools
  • Knowledge of other web technologies and UI / UX standards
  • Ability to design applications around natural user interfaces, such as “touch” and “swipe”
  • Familiarity with the use of additional sensors, such as gyroscopes and NFC
  • Knowledge of the open-source Android ecosystem and the libraries available for common tasks
  • Ability to understand business requirements and translate them into technical requirements
  • Familiarity with cloud message APIs and push notifications
  • Knack for benchmarking and optimization
  • Loves writing unit testing
  • Experience working with GitHub, CircleCI or equivalent continuous integration tools
  • Experience working in small teams / fast-paced environment / loose specs, with keen understanding of agile development process

Preferred (iOS dev.):

  • Proficient with Objective-C, Swift, and Cocoa Touch
  • Experience with iOS frameworks such as Core Data, Core Animation, etc.
  • Experience with RESTful APIs to connect iOS applications to back-end services
  • Understanding of Apple’s design principles and interface guidelines
  • Knowledge of low-level C-based libraries

About TED

TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. Our agenda is to make great ideas accessible and spark conversation. Everything we do — from our TED Talks videos to the projects sparked by the TED Prize, from the global TEDx community to the TED-Ed lesson series — is driven by this goal: How can we best spread great ideas?

TED is owned by the Sapling Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation (a 501(c)3 organization under US tax code). The foundation was established in 1996 by publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson.

The goal of the Sapling Foundation is to foster the spread of great ideas. It aims to provide a platform for thinkers, visionaries and teachers, so that people around the globe can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world, and feed a desire to help create a better future. Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea.

TED is a global community — and so is our staff. We're headquartered in New York and Vancouver, but the collaborative and global nature of our work means we have staffers, advisors and volunteers worldwide.