SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 30,000 - 65,000 / 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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office.
You will lead the Android Core Product team, which builds 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 managing team dynamics and technical direction.
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 high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice patterns and consolidate duplicate solutions
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than 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
- Manage code review policies based on system risk, not blanket rules
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact—this is not a pure management track. You'll handle the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
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 approach, including limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stick after you stop pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: driving process change and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems your team actually uses, not just personal productivity gains
- 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 requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
