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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, news 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 maintains 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 and technical standards.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone's been stuck for two days and help directly
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that adoption
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Lead process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers issues
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to grow
The role explicitly values hands-on technical contribution alongside leadership. You'll write code, review code, and own features—that doesn't shrink when you take the job. The leadership part is catching duplication, deciding standards, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually needs a decision.
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 how to write tests, including what can't be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from what the system does
- Track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX further than the spec asks
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond what's outlined in the spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
