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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, Speechify operates with no physical office.
You will lead the Android team responsible for the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you will write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, 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
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps engineers learn and grow
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate shared infrastructure when multiple versions of the same solution emerge
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on high-impact decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing and checks
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level 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
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what cannot be covered by automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort with organizational change and the friction it creates
- Clear perspective on which code changes require heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-driven approach to improving the app and codebase
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
