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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 elevating team execution. You'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and drive how the team works together.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should be standardized
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left
- 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
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work
- Drive process improvements and call when the team needs to change how it works
The role emphasizes that you'll spend roughly equal time writing code and on leadership activities. You'll need comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing the friction that follows. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those raising concerns.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that persisted after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools your team actually used, 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
