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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—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store—as the user base has grown faster than the team's ability to build for it. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating how the team operates.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code reviews that help people learn, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should consolidate
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated; reduce duplication
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and bring team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to grow
The role balances technical leadership with hands-on coding. You'll write code, review code, and own features—that responsibility doesn't shrink. The other half is the work that doesn't happen on its own: catching duplicate solutions, deciding which version the team uses, and ensuring time goes to work that needs decisions.
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and obsession with winning are paramount.
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 how to approach writing tests, including what can't be covered
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX further than the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond the spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
