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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / 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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the team's development velocity.
You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on technical leader. This is explicitly not a management-only role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding on standardized approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice patterns and solve them systematically
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- 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 learning-focused work assignments
Speechy is a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The organization is flat and values technical excellence, delivery speed, work ethic, and communication.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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 what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the team actually used, not only things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- 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
