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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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity. You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader who continues writing and owning features while elevating team execution.
This is explicitly a hybrid IC/manager role. You will write code, review pull requests, and own major features end-to-end from decision through release. Simultaneously, you will own team-level responsibilities: catching duplicate solutions across the team, standardizing on shared approaches, unblocking engineers stuck on problems, maintaining reliability metrics, reducing manual release overhead, and running planning sessions that focus team attention on decisions rather than clear work.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and ship major features working closely with design, from conception to release
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for critical features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Actively unblock teammates and notice systemic problems (e.g., when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup)
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared patterns
- Improve release automation and shift verification left through better testing
- Run planning to focus team effort on high-decision work
- Develop junior engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The company has won Chrome Extension of the Year (Google) and Design Award for Inclusivity (Apple, 2025).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the adoption cost
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build things your team actually uses, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
