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Salary: USD 30,000 - 65,000 / 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 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 leadership work that doesn't happen on its own—eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and improving how the team operates.
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 needs help
- Consolidate duplicate work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements based on team feedback
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and a drive to win are paramount. You'll work with a skeptical, thoughtful team that raises specific concerns worth acting on.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong expertise in 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 practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just personal productivity tools
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
