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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.
This is explicitly a hybrid role: you will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on team coordination, process improvement, and strategic technical decisions rather than people management in the traditional sense. You'll own major features from conception through release in close collaboration with design. You'll maintain reliability metrics for key features, provide code review that teaches rather than merely approves, and unblock teammates who get stuck. You'll identify when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately and consolidate on a single approach. You'll improve the team's processes: reducing manual work in releases, shifting verification left through automation, running planning sessions that focus on decisions rather than clear work, and determining appropriate review rigor for different code areas.
You'll also mentor early-career engineers, participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design to surface engineering constraints early, handle critical issues and feature releases, and provide nightly builds for QA. The role emphasizes technical excellence, user empathy, and the ability to drive process change even when it creates friction.
Speeify is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and high-growth startups. 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
- 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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a change to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, 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 light review, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader 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 specification
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined scope
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
