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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, news 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 elevating team execution. The role balances writing and reviewing code with team leadership responsibilities.
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 team members and identify when shared solutions should replace duplicated work
- Consolidate technical approaches and keep shared infrastructure maintainable
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual release steps, shift verification left, improve automated testing
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- 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
- Identify when team processes need to change and lead that transition
The organization is flat; leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work with a skeptical, high-caliber team that values specific feedback on process decisions.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing strategy: what to test, what can't be covered, and how to approach test design
- 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 difficult parts of leadership: asking teams to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Principled views on code review rigor based on system behavior and risk
- History of building tools and 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 specifications
- Self-driven approach to improving the app and codebase beyond the spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
