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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / 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 no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
You will lead the Android team responsible for the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you continue writing and reviewing code while also managing team dynamics and technical direction. The split is intentional: you own features end-to-end alongside your leadership responsibilities.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when solutions should be standardized across the team
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Identify when team processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; shift verification left to automation
- Run planning 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 to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Work with the team on how AI agents fit into your workflow
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll be expected to handle 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
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stick after you stop pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: driving process change and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools the team actually uses, 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/NodeJS experience.
