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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 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 explicitly a hands-on role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on team coordination, process improvement, and unblocking work rather than pure management.
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 team members stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Maintain shared code: keep it tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's working process needs to change and lead that transition
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left by expanding automated checks so QA receives confirmed builds
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Define review requirements by area and identify critical sign-off points
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers is often specific and valuable; those raising concerns 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
- Strong expertise in 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
- Track record of introducing something 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
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
