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Salary: USD 30,000 - 80,000 / 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 team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead the Android Core Product team, owning 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 conception through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock team members and identify when someone is stuck
- Consolidate duplicate work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers and ensure they have learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and handle the friction that comes with change
The role emphasizes that your code will remain a significant part of your impact, not something that shrinks when you take the leadership position. You'll be expected to notice systemic issues, propose solutions, and see them through. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those who raise concerns.
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 including 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
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including knowledge of what cannot be tested
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that persist after you stop actively promoting them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-driven approach to improving the app and codebase
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus qualifications:
- Open source Android project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
