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, 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 on 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 manager. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing team approaches, unblocking teammates, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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
- Unblock teammates and notice when someone is stuck
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Lead process improvements and team working agreements
The role emphasizes technical depth, product intuition, and the ability to drive organizational change while remaining a strong individual contributor.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level 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
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: 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 tools/systems your team actually used, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
