SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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 also elevating team execution and technical standards.
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 thoughtful code review and mentorship that helps engineers learn
- Unblock teammates and identify when shared solutions should replace duplicated work
- 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 clear-cut work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work with time to reflect
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact—this is not a pure management track. You'll spend time on hands-on delivery, code review, unblocking, and systemic improvements. The company values skepticism from engineers and expects you to act on specific concerns about team processes.
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 how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by automated tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects 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 things that made you personally 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.
