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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'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 write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on team coordination, technical decision-making, and process improvement—catching when multiple engineers solve the same problem separately, standardizing on the best approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires decisions rather than routine execution.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide substantive code review that helps engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; identify and resolve technical bottlenecks
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention in builds
- Run planning sessions focused on high-impact decisions
- 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 appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements: when the same problem appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing so QA confirms rather than discovers issues
The role emphasizes technical excellence, user empathy, and the ability to lead through influence in a flat organization. You'll need comfort with the unpopular aspects 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
- 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: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by automated tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the friction of organizational change and asking people to work differently
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools and patterns your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
