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Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / 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, owning the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you continue writing and reviewing code while managing team dynamics and technical direction. The split is intentional: you own features end-to-end alongside your leadership responsibilities.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features 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 team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual release steps, shift verification left, improve testing automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and nightly QA builds
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Lead team discussions on how the team works; implement changes despite friction
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work with a skeptical, high-caliber team and are expected to act on their concerns.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or 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 practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them (with honest assessment of adoption costs)
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools/systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
