SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office.
You will lead Speechify's Android app—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store—as the team scales to meet user growth. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team execution.
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 by identifying bottlenecks and diving in to help
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team adopts
- Improve release processes: reduce manual steps, shift verification left, automate what can be checked
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and surface team constraints early
- 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 process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The role balances technical depth with leadership: you'll spend roughly half your time writing and reviewing code, and half on the work that doesn't happen on its own—noticing when three people solved the same problem separately, deciding which version the team uses, and ensuring time goes to decisions that matter.
Speechify operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and a winning mindset.
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 tests cannot cover
- Evidence of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects 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 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 requirements
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
