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Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people globally to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees across a fully distributed team and has won recognition from Google (Chrome Extension of the Year) and Apple (Design award for inclusivity, 2025).
You will lead the Android Core Product team, which owns the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also managing team dynamics and technical direction.
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 high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- 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 for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Lead process improvements and handle the interpersonal friction that comes with change
The role emphasizes that code you write will be roughly half your impact; the other half is unblocking the team, standardizing approaches, improving processes, and developing people. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
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 limitations of automated tests
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- 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, not just personal experience
- 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.
