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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 no physical office. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to support it.
You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end, from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice and help when someone has been stuck for two days
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code in working order: tested, clear, and consolidated when duplicates appear
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA receives a confirmation, not a first discovery
- Run planning so team attention goes to decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify where sign-off is always needed
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Develop early-career engineers by giving them learnable work and time to learn from it
The company operates as a flat organization where anyone can become a leader by demonstrating excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and a drive to win are paramount.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you work personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open-source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
