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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead Speechify's Android team, which maintains 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 and review code, own features end-to-end, and also handle the work that doesn't happen on its own—eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that matter.
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 people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate when multiple versions of the same solution exist
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning 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 learning-focused work
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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 philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- 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 half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build things your team actually uses, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
