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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, 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 explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also elevating team execution.
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 code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should consolidate
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements: reduce manual release steps, shift verification left, improve automated testing
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and surface team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and own feature releases
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work allocation
- Introduce and embed new practices and standards
The role emphasizes that code you write remains a significant part of your impact, but leadership—noticing systemic problems, consolidating duplicated work, improving team processes, and handling the friction of change—becomes the larger half.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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
- Shipped and maintained background audio or long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing strategy—what can and cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing 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
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools and patterns your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined scope
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
