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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 no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding. You will write code, review code, and own features yourself—this responsibility does not diminish when you take the job. The leadership part involves the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which solution the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made rather than routine execution.
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 feedback that helps people learn, not just approve/reject
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; actively debug and help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that consolidation
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's working processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift testing left: grow automated checks so the nightly QA build is confirmation, not discovery
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions, not routine work
- Define review requirements by area; establish who must sign off on what
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints into those conversations early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers, ensuring they get learning opportunities and time to grow
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and a drive to win are paramount. The role explicitly acknowledges that some team members will be skeptical about how the team is asked to work—that skepticism is usually specific and worth acting on, and skeptics 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 expertise in 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 how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it; honest account of the cost to get there
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction that follows
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from what the system does
- 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 work personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond what's outlined in the spec
- Excellent communication skills
**Bonus:**
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open-source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
