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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 no physical office.
You will lead Speechify's Android app team—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also driving team-level improvements. The split is intentional: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and simultaneously handle the work that doesn't happen on its own—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that matter.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared patterns
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on work requiring decisions
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and bring team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work
- Drive process improvements and call for team-wide changes when needed
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount.
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 can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- 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, or NodeJS experience.
