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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 a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on work that doesn't happen automatically—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process and improve automation
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify necessary sign-offs
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Develop early-career engineers by giving them learnable work and time to learn
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and competitive drive. You'll work in a skeptical, high-bar culture where engineer concerns are taken seriously and often assigned to the person raising them.
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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by automation
- 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 half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
