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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, news 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 also elevating team execution and technical standards.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide mentoring code reviews that help engineers learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; consolidate duplicate solutions across the team
- Maintain shared infrastructure—tested, documented, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual release steps, shift verification left with automated checks, improve planning to focus on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints into early planning
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop junior engineers by assigning work they can learn from and protecting time for growth
- Lead team discussions on how to work with AI agents and improve team processes
You'll operate in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires 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
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort asking teams to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools and practices your team actually adopted, not just things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
