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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 Speechify's Android app team, which powers 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 unblocking teammates, standardizing solutions across the team, and driving process improvements.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception 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 multiple people have solved the same problem separately and consolidate to a single team standard
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and call for changes in how the team works when needed
The company emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
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
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing approaches, including what cannot be covered by automated 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 difficult aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted and used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
