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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 team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead the Android Core Product 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 also elevating team execution. The split is intentional: you'll write code, review code, and own features, but the leadership portion focuses on preventing duplicate work, standardizing solutions, ensuring team time goes to decisions that matter, and improving how the team operates.
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 high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut 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
- Lead team process improvements, including how to work with AI agents
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll be expected to handle 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
- 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
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what can and cannot be tested
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: driving process change and managing resulting friction
- Ability to reason about which changes require heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-driven approach to improving the app and codebase
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
