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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 no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple awarding it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
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 leadership role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team execution and technical standards.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide mentoring code reviews that help engineers learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; consolidate duplicate solutions across the team
- Maintain shared infrastructure: ensure tested, clear, and consolidated code
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual intervention in releases, shift verification left with automated checks, improve planning to focus on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints into those conversations early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Develop junior engineers by assigning work they can learn from and protecting time for that learning
- Lead team planning and establish review standards based on system risk, not blanket rules
The role emphasizes that code you write will be the smaller half of your impact. You'll handle the work that doesn't happen on its own: noticing when three people solved the same problem separately, deciding which version the team should standardize on, and managing the friction that comes with asking people to change how they work.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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 tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review and which don't, based on system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build 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 work personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
