Chris Houston
Senior Android Engineer
Homeroom
A cross-platform student productivity app built with Kotlin Multiplatform and Firebase. Homeroom helps students manage homework, track assignments, maintain advanced schedules, calculate grades, and leverage AI-powered features like personalized study guides and document summarization. Seamlessly delivers native experiences on both Android and iOS through shared business logic and platform-specific UI implementations.
About me
Senior Android Engineer with 7+ years building consumer Android apps at scale. Strong in Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Clean Architecture (MVVM), with a focus on performance, testing, and end-to-end ownership. Shipped 7+ personal apps with nearly 1 million total downloads.
Experience
- Played a key role in a team of 3, creating a new Android app from scratch, implementing clean architecture patterns, Jetpack Compose, MVVM, and reusable UI components to create a highly responsive, scalable app to migrate all existing 50,000+ teams to.
- Owned and launched GameZone, a real-time engagement feature where users view live scores, share media, and tag players, boosting in-app activity and team communication.
- Collaborated with another developer to launch a scheduling system supporting individual and multi-team views, complete with event details and maps integration.
- Collaborated closely with product managers, designers, and backend engineers, wearing multiple hats to drive features from early discovery through production delivery.
- Led Android development with a team of 3 to integrate Intuit Payroll into QuickBooks Workforce, expanding user base by 2 million new users while collaborating with multiple Payroll teams (3x growth), supporting the Android release management cycle and ensuring stable production releases.
- Acted as Scrum Master of a team of 7 and mentored junior developers and upheld engineering best practices through code reviews, pairing, and technical documentation.
- Led the separation of legacy code into modules, improving architecture scalability and enabling faster, safer development in a large Android codebase.
- Took ownership of Payroll module automated test suite, increasing coverage from 61% to 93% and exceeding the 80% target.
- Partnered with product and analytics to run A/B tests with feature flags and controlled rollouts, improving feature adoption and funnel conversion.
- Designed and launched the premium Activity Feed, enabling users to post media, tag teammates, and reply in threads - significantly boosting daily engagement.
- Built and maintained key workforce features including My Team, Who's Working, and Timesheets within a large, multi-module Android codebase, improving adoption and retention.
- Collaborated with product and design to refine user experiences, consistently delivering features on time and with high user satisfaction scores.
Skills
Android & Architecture
Tooling & Data
Monitoring & Teamwork
Projects
- Developed and launched Homeroom, a cross-platform student productivity app for homework tracking, advanced scheduling, grading, and AI powered features.
- Built on Kotlin Multiplatform with Firebase for authentication, real-time data sync, cloud storage, and analytics, enabling seamless iOS/Android functionality.
Education
My Apps
