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Salary: USD 30,000 - 65,000 / 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 no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
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 which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made rather than routine execution.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than routine 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
The company values flat structure, technical excellence, strong communication, and a winning mindset. You'll work in a 100% distributed environment with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and other high-growth companies.
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
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems your team actually used, not only things that made you personally 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 specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
