SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between individual technical contributions (owning major features end-to-end, maintaining reliability metrics, writing code) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, running planning, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that adoption
- Maintain shared code: keep it tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Improve release processes: reduce manual intervention, shift verification left, automate what can be checked
- Run planning 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
- Develop junior engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Recognize when team processes need to change and drive that change despite friction
Speechy values flat structure and believes leaders emerge through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires 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 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, argued from 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/NodeJS experience.
