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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 Speechify's Android 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 work that doesn't happen on its own—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to 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 teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared patterns
- Keep core infrastructure tested, clear, and maintainable
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; shift verification left
- 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
- Develop early-career engineers by giving them learnable work and time to learn
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work in an environment that values skepticism—engineers who question how the team works often raise specific, actionable concerns worth acting on.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from system behavior
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
