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Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, articles, and web content into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store, and the team is growing faster than the codebase can keep pace.
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 pull requests, and own features yourself. The leadership portion 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 owning major features end-to-end from design through release; maintaining and improving reliability metrics for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; unblocking teammates stuck on problems; consolidating duplicate implementations; keeping shared infrastructure tested and maintainable; calling when the team needs to change how it works; reducing manual work in the release process; automating verification so QA confirms rather than discovers; running planning focused on decisions rather than clear work; determining appropriate review levels for different code areas; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds; and ensuring junior engineers get learning opportunities.
Speechify is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and founders of other companies. The company operates as a flat organization where technical excellence and consistent delivery create leadership opportunities.
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
- Evidence of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- 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 spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
