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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 Speechify's Android app team, which powers 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 and product quality.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design
- Write and review code; provide mentoring feedback on pull requests
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; consolidate duplicated solutions across the team
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention in builds
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and call for team-wide changes when needed
The role balances hands-on technical work (roughly half your impact) with leadership activities: noticing when the team needs process changes, consolidating shared infrastructure, and ensuring team time goes to high-leverage decisions.
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
- Understanding of testing importance and strategy, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that persisted after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools/systems your team actually used, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
