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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 elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need human judgment.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate shared infrastructure when multiple versions of the same solution emerge
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on work requiring decisions, not already-clear tasks
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop junior engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll be expected to handle the unpopular parts of leadership—asking people to change workflows and managing the friction that follows.
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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy—what can and cannot be covered by automated tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that persisted after you stopped championing them, with honest reflection on the adoption cost
- Comfort with organizational friction; ability to advocate for process changes and live with resistance
- Clear reasoning about which code changes require heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build 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 your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
