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, 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 team, which owns 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. You'll own major features end-to-end, from conception through release, working closely with design and product. You'll also drive process improvements: consolidating duplicate solutions, improving reliability metrics, reducing manual release overhead, and shifting verification left through automation.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning and shipping major features with real delivery accountability
- Code review and mentorship that helps engineers grow
- Unblocking teammates and noticing systemic problems (e.g., when the same issue appears twice, fix the root cause)
- Maintaining shared infrastructure and core components
- Running planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution details
- Driving team process improvements and calling when the team is ready to change how it works
- Handling critical issues and providing nightly builds for QA
- Developing junior engineers and ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
The role emphasizes that your code will remain a significant part of your impact, but leadership and process work will be the larger half. You'll need comfort with 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
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the friction of asking teams to change how they work
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building things your team actually used, not just personal productivity tools
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
