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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, 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 owns 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 elevating team execution. You'll own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product. You'll maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features, provide code reviews that teach rather than just approve, and unblock teammates stuck on problems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and ship major features end-to-end, working with design and product teams
- Maintain reliability metrics and improve them over time
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock team members and identify when shared solutions should replace duplicated work
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than 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 learning opportunities
- Work with AI agents and describe how your team operates with them
The role emphasizes that code you write will be the smaller half of your impact. You'll notice when three people have solved the same problem separately, decide which version the team should use, and ensure time goes to work that actually needs decisions. You're expected to be comfortable with 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view 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 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.
