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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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity.
You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a management-only role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding on standardized approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end, from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide substantive code review that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual intervention in releases, shift verification left, improve automation
- 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 own feature releases
- Mentor early-career engineers and create learning opportunities
- Lead discussions about how the team works and drive adoption of improvements
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally. The company has received recognition from Google (Chrome Extension of the Year) and Apple (Design award for inclusivity, 2025).
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 limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult 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 that the team actually adopted and used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- 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 contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
