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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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.
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 team execution and processes.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; provide mentoring feedback on pull requests
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; consolidate duplicate solutions into shared, tested components
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Mentor junior engineers, ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Drive process improvements: notice when the team's workflow needs to change and lead that transition
The role emphasizes that code you write will be roughly half your impact; the other half is organizational: eliminating duplicate work, standardizing approaches, improving processes, and developing people. You'll need comfort with the friction that comes from asking teams to change how they work.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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 tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it (with honest reflection on the cost)
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing the resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior, not just opinion
- History of building tools/systems your team actually used, not only things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
