SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / 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 Core Product team, which maintains the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also providing technical leadership and team coordination.
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 code review and mentorship that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members and identify when shared solutions should replace duplicated work
- Maintain core shared infrastructure—tested, documented, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements and determine when the team's working approach needs to change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Ensure junior engineers receive learning opportunities and appropriate mentorship
The role emphasizes that you will continue writing and reviewing code; the leadership component is about eliminating duplication, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires decisions. You'll need comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership—asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
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 strategy, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, 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 personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
