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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, news articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office.
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 providing technical leadership and team coordination.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own major features end-to-end, from decision through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; maintain ownership of your own features alongside leadership duties
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps engineers learn and grow
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention in builds
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements
The role emphasizes hands-on technical work (code writing and review remain substantial) combined with leadership that improves how the team operates. You'll notice when three people have solved the same problem separately and consolidate to one approach. You'll shift verification left by growing automated checks. You'll handle the unpopular parts of leadership—asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from excellent technical skills and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning.
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 how to approach writing tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest accounting of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, 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 how you do personally
- 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:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open-source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
