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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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a management-only role—you will continue writing and reviewing code, owning features end-to-end, and shipping releases. The leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires decisions rather than routine execution.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and help directly
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard, and drive that adoption
- 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 so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine 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
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning work and time to learn
- Listen to engineer skepticism about processes; it's often specific and worth acting on
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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 tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by automation
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 your personal approach
- 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.
