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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 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 explicitly a hands-on role where you continue writing and reviewing code while also providing technical leadership. The split is intentional: you own major features end-to-end and write code yourself, while the leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, consolidating duplicate work, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Determine appropriate review levels for different code areas
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning opportunities
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work with a skeptical, thoughtful team that raises specific concerns worth acting on.
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 other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building things your team actually used, not just things that made you faster
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
