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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a fully distributed, 100% remote company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a pure management role—you will write code, review pull requests, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on eliminating friction: catching duplicate solutions across the team, standardizing approaches, ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made, and raising 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 systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- 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 provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Lead team process improvements, including handling the friction that comes with change
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often valid and worth investigating. You'll be expected to balance hands-on technical contribution with team leadership, and to drive improvements in both code quality and team effectiveness.
**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 limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review based on 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 experience
- 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
