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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, 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 explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also managing team dynamics and technical direction.
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 high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Consolidate duplicate solutions across the team; identify when one person's work should become the team standard
- Maintain shared code: ensure it's tested, clear, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements; call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification and testing
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Determine review requirements by area and ownership
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers is often specific and valuable; the people raising concerns are often the right ones to solve the underlying problem. 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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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 managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, 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 personal experience
- 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.
