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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 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 leadership role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team execution and decision-making.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code reviews that teach and develop team members
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicate work and establish shared patterns the team adopts
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and advocate for team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop early-career engineers with meaningful work and learning time
The role emphasizes hands-on technical contribution alongside leadership. You'll write code, review code, and own features—the leadership work is the "other half" of your impact: catching duplication, standardizing approaches, removing blockers, and improving how the team operates. The company values skepticism from engineers and expects you to handle the friction that comes with asking people to change how they work.
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 effective tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by tests
- 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 unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually uses, not just personal productivity tools
- 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 contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
