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Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, 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 elevating team execution. The split is deliberate: 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 to be made.
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 systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate when multiple versions of the same solution emerge
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
The organization is flat; leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll be expected to push back on process friction and help the team evolve how it works.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
