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Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, news articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead Speechify's Android app—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store—as the user base has grown faster than the team's ability to build for it. This is explicitly a hands-on role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive fixes
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns
- Lead team planning to focus on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes; shift verification left by automating checks
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Establish review standards based on system risk, not blanket rules
- Drive process improvements and handle the friction that comes with asking teams to change how they work
The company emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about team processes is often specific and worth acting on, and those raising concerns are often the right people to own the underlying problem.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review and which don't, based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
