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Salary: USD 30,000 - 55,000 / 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 no physical office. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a management-only role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which solution the team standardizes on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward 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 code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning so the team focuses on work requiring decisions, not already-clear 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
- Shift verification left by expanding automated checks
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those raising concerns.
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 cannot 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 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 the 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.
