SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 30,000 - 160,000 / 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 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 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 those conversations early
- Handle critical issues and nightly QA builds
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Lead team planning and establish appropriate review standards for different code areas
The role explicitly balances hands-on technical work (roughly half your impact) with leadership and process work (the other half). You'll notice when the team is ready to change how it works, handle skepticism constructively, and drive adoption of improvements.
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 practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools and systems your team actually adopted, not just things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only 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.
