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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 no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple awarding it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
You will lead the Android Core Product team. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base has grown faster than the engineering capacity to support it. This is explicitly a hands-on role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring 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
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help and step in
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code components tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- 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, not first-pass discovery
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify where sign-off is always needed
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Ensure junior engineers get learning-rich work and time to learn from it
The company values skepticism from engineers about how work is organized; such concerns are usually specific and worth acting on, and the people raising them are often the right ones to solve the underlying problem.
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 how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost to get there
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction that follows
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from what the system does
- 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 how you do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
