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Salary: USD 30,000 - 65,000 / 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 the Android team responsible for Speechify's 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 team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made, and raising how the team works.
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 people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate work and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning opportunities
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll need comfort with the unpopular parts of the job: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including limitations
- Track record of introducing practices to teams that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools your team actually used, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
