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Salary: USD 30,000 - 80,000 / 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 has ~200 employees across a fully distributed, office-free organization. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than 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 a unified approach, and ensuring the team's 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 code review feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and keep shared code in working order
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left (automate what can be checked)
- Run planning so the team focuses on work requiring decisions, not work already clear
- 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 and ensure they have learning opportunities
- Lead process improvements and handle the friction that comes with asking people to change how they work
The role emphasizes that your code will be the smaller half of your impact. You'll need to be comfortable with the unpopular parts of leadership: pushing for process changes and living with 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
- 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
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot 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 asking people to change how they work and managing the 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, not only how you work personally
- 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.
