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, news 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 management-only role—you will continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between individual technical contributions (owning major features end-to-end, writing code, reviewing pull requests) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, standardizing shared components, improving processes, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features 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 when solutions should be standardized across the team
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual work in releases, shift verification left with automated checks, improve planning to focus on decisions rather than clear work
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Develop team practices around AI agents and modern tooling
The role emphasizes technical excellence, user empathy, and the ability to drive organizational change despite friction. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical skill and consistent delivery.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy: what can and cannot be covered by automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices/tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Principled view on code review rigor (which changes need heavy review, which don't, based on system behavior)
- Track record of building tools/systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
