At Facebook, we’re always innovating. We caught up with Udi, a senior software engineer in New York, to ask him one question: “What problem are you solving today?” Here’s what he told us.

I started my engineering career in the Israel Defense Forces, working with Java; but I always found development for small devices more appealing. That curiosity led me to Any.do, an Israeli startup, where I led the development of the Android app; and then to Samsung, where I was the lead engineer on a big Android project. I’ve worked on the Android platform now for over seven years, but at Facebook, I get to dive deeper than I ever have before. I’m currently focused on improving the video experience in News Feed on Android, and creating the framework and solutions that improve how video is working for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Ensuring videos play smoothly within a scrollable format is a fascinating challenge, and that’s exactly why I’m excited to work on this team.

Videos demand more resources than simpler UI elements like text and photos, and are at greater risk of dropping frames, which can cause a jittery experience for users. There are also several variations of video story types shared within News Feed, from video that’s shared as an attachment to a regular post, like a Facebook Live or 360 video, to those that play a generated video, a sponsored message, or a short animation. These challenges are only intensified by the broad range of Android devices on the market. To tackle this, we recently migrated News Feed on Android to be powered by Litho, our open source UI rendering framework. The new Litho video component has provided tremendous benefits, helping optimize News Feed to render video content more efficiently and providing a more flexible design that can be easily reused for various video features that other teams are working on.

What I love about Facebook is that we don’t direct people what to do; we help them figure out what needs to be done and let them find their way. That culture has opened up so many opportunities for me to solve complex problems, like the challenges I’m tackling with video in News Feed and other interesting infrastructure pieces in our Android app. At Facebook, I can choose my own projects, and develop and improve the product over time. I have the freedom to work on what I enjoy, and that happens to be a product people love and use every day.

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