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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / 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 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 not a management-only role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding on standardized approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made.
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
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Reduce manual intervention in the release process
- Shift verification left by expanding automated checks
- Run planning sessions 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 appropriate learning opportunities
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The culture values flat hierarchy, technical excellence, work ethic, communication, and competitive drive.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 approach, including what can't 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 managing 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
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
