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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, Speechify operates with engineers and researchers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups.
You will lead the Android Core Product team, which owns 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 elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring team time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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 engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them at the root
- Consolidate shared code and prevent duplication across the team
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear 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
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The organization is flat and values technical excellence, consistent delivery, strong communication, and a winning mindset. You'll work with skeptical engineers—their concerns are usually specific and worth acting on.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level 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 importance and strategy, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool 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
- Principled view on which changes require heavy review versus light review, based on system behavior
- History of building tools and systems that the team actually adopted and used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal practices
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
