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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, 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 app team, which powers the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team execution and product quality.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide mentoring code reviews that help engineers learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; consolidate duplicate solutions across the codebase
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention in builds and deployments
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing so QA confirms rather than discovers issues
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Establish review standards appropriate to each codebase area
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor junior engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
The role balances hands-on technical work (roughly half your impact) with leadership activities like unblocking, consolidation, process improvement, and mentoring. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major product 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including awareness of what tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking teams to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Principled views on code review intensity based on system risk and change type
- History of building tools and systems that your team actually adopted and used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond the spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus qualifications:
- Open source Android project contributions
- iOS, Web, or Node.js experience
