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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's 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 a hybrid role: you will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain significant individual technical contribution. The leadership portion focuses on team coordination, process improvement, and strategic decisions that don't happen automatically. You'll catch when multiple team members solve the same problem separately, consolidate approaches, and ensure the team's time goes toward work requiring decisions rather than routine execution.
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 feedback that helps people learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice and address blockers proactively
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Maintain shared code pieces: ensure they're tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's working process needs to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification and testing
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA receives confirmed builds
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than routine work
- Define 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
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and high-growth startups. The company has received recognition from Google (Chrome Extension of the Year) and Apple (Design award for inclusivity, 2025).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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
- Informed perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
