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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, 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 owns the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating how the team operates. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating duplicated work, making architectural decisions, ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that matter, and removing blockers.
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 feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone's been stuck for two days and help directly
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and ownership patterns
- 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 get learning-rich work and time to learn from it
Speechy values flat structure where anyone can lead by demonstrating technical excellence and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. The company explicitly notes that some engineers will be skeptical of how the team is asked to work—that skepticism is often specific and worth acting on, and those raising it are often the right people to own the underlying problem.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock solid 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 approach writing tests, including what can't be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest account of what it cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from what the system does
- Track record of building things the rest of 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 do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX further than the spec asks
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond what's outlined in the spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
