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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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 the Android Core Product team, which owns the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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; notice systemic issues and fix them at the root
- Consolidate shared infrastructure when multiple versions of the same solution emerge
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution details
- 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
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and a drive to win are paramount. You'll be comfortable with the unpopular parts 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
- Strong expertise in 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
- Deep understanding of testing approaches, including what can and cannot be covered by automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the friction of asking teams to change how they work
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just tools that made you personally faster
- 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 beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android project contributions
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
