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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 team, which powers 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 how the team operates.
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 high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock team members 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 clear-cut 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and call for team-wide changes when needed
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact—this is not a pure management track. You'll need comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong expertise in Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including test limitations
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools your team actually used, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
