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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 maintains 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. The split is intentional: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and also handle the leadership work that doesn't happen automatically—eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and driving process improvements.
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 code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish team 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
- Handle critical issues and nightly QA builds
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership—asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Shipped and maintained background audio or long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing strategy—what can and cannot be covered by 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 friction of asking teams to change working practices
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools and systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- 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 specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
