SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed 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 manager. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also managing team dynamics, architecture decisions, and process improvements. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you ship, and half from the leadership work that doesn't happen on its own.
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 code review feedback that helps people learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard, and drive that consolidation
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated—eliminate duplicate implementations
- Call when the team's processes need to change rather than waiting for organic evolution
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Fix systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, change the underlying setup to prevent a third occurrence
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area; establish who must sign off on what
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The role emphasizes technical leadership in a flat organization. You'll be comfortable with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll have a view on which changes need heavy review based on system behavior, not politics.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 what tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change workflows 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 experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
