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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, Speechify has built a team of engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups.
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 where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating team execution.
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 and mentorship that helps engineers grow
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning 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 get learning opportunities and time to develop
The role emphasizes that you will continue writing and reviewing code, owning features, and shipping work. Leadership here means reducing friction, consolidating patterns, catching duplicated effort, and making the team's time go to decisions that actually need to be made. You'll need 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
- 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from 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/NodeJS experience.
