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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 the Android Core Product team, which owns the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating how the team operates. You'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and spend roughly half your time on leadership activities that don't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's effort goes toward work requiring decisions.
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 high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them at the root
- Consolidate shared code and eliminate redundant implementations
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning focused on decision-critical work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Decide which changes need heavy review and which don't, based on system impact
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
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
- Deep understanding of testing importance and strategy, including what tests cannot cover
- Demonstrated 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 how they work
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools and systems your team actually used, 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 specifications
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
