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Chris Banes

Resume

15 years building applications, libraries, and developer tools. The last 5+ in Staff+ engineering and technical leadership roles spanning Android, iOS, TV, and Web. Deep experience in UI engineering, Kotlin Multiplatform, cross-platform architecture, and AI developer tooling.

  • Written over 50 blog posts (and more on Medium) about Android and cross-platform development, many of which became de facto guidance on their topics.
  • Given over 25 talks at conferences including Google I/O, Droidcon, and Android Dev Summit.
  • Defined and shipped Kotlin Multiplatform architecture across Android, iOS, and TV at The Trade Desk.

Career
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Senior Staff Software Engineer – The Trade Desk
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May 2023 – present

Clients Tech Lead for Ventura OS — a new streaming TV operating system for the open internet. Own the technical direction across all client platforms (mobile, set-top box, and web), with growing involvement in engineering-wide initiatives.

  • Directed cross-platform technology strategy for Ventura OS, establishing the mobile engineering function from scratch to support 10 engineers across mobile and set-top box.
  • Accelerated multi-platform delivery by championing Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, building the architectural foundation for all current production shipping.
  • Eliminated manual UI syncs by aligning engineering and UX on a unified design system, building custom tooling to generate SwiftUI, Android, and Web components from a single source.
  • Streamlined organizational delivery by leading the zero-downtime consolidation of 3 large repositories into a unified client monorepo, completely rearchitecting CI/CD and code ownership.
  • Eliminated visual regressions by integrating automated, multi-device snapshot testing directly into the code review pipeline.
  • Increased engineering velocity by driving the strategic rollout of AI developer tooling across 25 Ventura engineers.
  • Upskilled multiple iOS-native engineers to independently ship production KMP code by establishing structured, cross-domain mentorship.

Staff Software Engineer – Twitter
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September 2021 – November 2022

Technical Lead of the Client UI Android team. Owned the technical strategy for modernising UI development across Twitter’s Android organisation.

  • Spearheaded the migration to Jetpack Compose across Twitter’s 150-person Android organization, defining the infrastructure and adoption strategy that reduced UI feature development time.
  • Unified Android UI infrastructure for ~20 feature teams, architecting core component libraries and tooling that eliminated design fragmentation.
  • Directed a 7-engineer team, establishing rigorous engineering standards (design docs, structured reviews) that decreased regression rates and accelerated onboarding.

Staff Developer Relations Engineer – Google
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January 2013 – August 2021

Part of the Android Developer Relations team for nearly nine years, split between hands-on engineering and outreach. Shaped the libraries and patterns that most Android developers used daily during that era.

  • Lead engineer on AppCompat for ~5 years, bringing consistent Material Design to 99% of Android devices.
  • Lead engineer on the Design Support Library, which became the foundation for Material Design Components for Android.
  • Created the Palette library for colour extraction from images.
  • Shaped feature proposals for Android Jetpack and Platform.
  • Managed teams across locations and timezones.
  • Wrote technical blog posts, documentation, and gave talks at Google I/O and other conferences.

Earlier roles
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  • Omnifone - Android Developer (June–August 2012)
  • Mobile Interactive Group - Android Developer (Jan–May 2012)
  • OneLouder Apps - Senior Android Developer (July 2011–Jan 2012)
  • BSkyB - Android Developer (Sept–Nov 2011)
  • IBM, Software Engineer (June 2008–Sept 2009)
  • Creator of Friendcaster for Facebook, the most popular third-party Facebook client for Android. Acquired by OneLouder Apps, where I continued development for a year. Ranked in the top 100 on Google Play with over 6.5 million installs.

Open Source
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  • Haze (2.3k stars) - Glass blur effects for Compose Multiplatform.
  • Accompanist (7.8k stars) - Utilities for Jetpack Compose before the framework caught up.
  • Insetter (1.1k stars) - Simple WindowInsets handling for Android.
  • Tivi (6.7k stars) - TV show tracking app, a widely-referenced example of modern Android architecture.
  • PhotoView (18.8k stars) - Pinch-to-zoom for Android ImageViews. (Original creator.)
  • Android-PullToRefresh (8.7k stars) - One of the first pull-to-refresh implementations for Android, before the pattern was added to the platform.

Education
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Aston University Sept 2006 – June 2010 Computing Science BSc (Hons) 1st Class