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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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity. You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on technical leader.
This is explicitly a hybrid IC/manager role. You will continue writing and reviewing code and owning features, while also providing technical leadership and team coordination. The leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately and consolidating approaches, ensuring the team's time goes toward work requiring decisions rather than routine execution, and raising team standards around code quality and architecture.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that develops team members, not just approvals
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive fixes
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and maintainable
- Lead team process improvements and call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than routine work
- Establish appropriate review rigor for different areas of the codebase
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning work they can learn from
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and founders. The company has received recognition including Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design Award for inclusivity (2025).
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
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Informed perspective on which changes require heavy review versus light 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 AI usage
- 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, or NodeJS experience.
