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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple awarding it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
You will lead the Android Core Product team, owning the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you continue writing and reviewing code while also managing team dynamics and technical direction.
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
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should be standardized
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- 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
- Drive process improvements and call when the team needs to change how it works
The role emphasizes that code you write will be the smaller half of your impact. You'll spend significant time on the "unpopular half" of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing the friction that follows. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those raising concerns.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, 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 aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review 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 personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
