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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 Speechify's Android 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 and technical standards.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Write and review code; maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide technical leadership through code review and mentorship that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; consolidate duplicate solutions into shared standards
- Maintain core infrastructure: ensure shared code is tested, documented, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual work in release cycles, shift verification left with automation
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Establish review standards appropriate to risk and system criticality
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and nightly QA builds
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Champion technical changes and manage the friction that comes with process evolution
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact—this is not a pure management track. You'll balance hands-on delivery with team-wide technical leadership, process design, and mentorship.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or ownership of a major product surface while remaining 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background services
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy: what tests can and cannot cover, and how to approach test strategy
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking teams to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Principled views on code review rigor, grounded in system behavior and risk
- History of building tools and systems that your 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-directed approach to improving the app and codebase
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions or maintenance
- Experience with iOS, Web, or Node.js
