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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity (2025).
You will lead the Android Core Product team, which owns 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
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review and mentorship that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The role emphasizes technical excellence, communication, and the ability to drive process improvements while maintaining skepticism toward change and addressing friction honestly.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools/systems that the team actually adopted, 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 specifications
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
