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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 the Android Core Product team, which owns the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you continue writing and reviewing code while also elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you own major features end-to-end alongside your leadership responsibilities.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and ship major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when solutions should be consolidated across the team
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left (automate what can be checked)
- Run planning so the team focuses on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and nightly QA builds
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Lead process improvements and handle the friction that comes with asking teams to change how they work
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: pushing for process change and living with the resulting friction.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 a practice to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only things that made you 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
