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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 driving team-level improvements.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review and mentorship that helps engineers grow
- Unblock team members and identify when shared solutions should replace duplicated work
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning sessions 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
- Ensure junior engineers have learning opportunities and appropriate support
- Lead process improvements and team working agreements
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact. You'll spend roughly half your time on hands-on engineering and half on team leadership, process improvement, and unblocking work. The company values skepticism about processes and encourages engineers to raise concerns about how the team works.
Speechify is a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company has received recognition including Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity (2025).
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 limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that persist after you stop pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to reason about which changes need heavy review versus light review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually uses
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Open source Android project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
