Lead Android Core Product Engineer — Remote

Canaan Partners; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Speechify, a remote-first company, is seeking an Android Team Lead to own core product features end-to-end and drive how the team delivers with a hands-on coding focus.

You will review PRs, ensure reliability of key features, and streamline release processes while mentoring engineers and collaborating with Product and Design. The role emphasizes strong Kotlin expertise and experience with background audio workloads.

Qualifications

• 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 the importance of tests and how to approach writing them, including what can't be covered by them.
• Something you introduced to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, and an honest account of what it cost to get there.
• Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: 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.
• A track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster.
• The ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally.
• Product design intuition, user empathy, and the drive to push Android UI/UX further than the spec asks for.
• Self‑drive to improve the app and codebase beyond what's outlined in the spec.
• Excellent communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own major features end to end, working closely with our design team — from the decision through to release.
• Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features.
• Review pull requests and give constructive feedback.
• Unblock the team when progress stalls and escalate where needed.
• Advise when a change should become the standard across the team.
• Keep shared code and assets maintained, tested, and easy for others to reuse.
• Lead organizational changes when necessary to improve workflows.
• Reduce manual steps required to get a correct release.
• Address recurring issues by changing underlying setups.
• Push verification left with automation to support QA builds.
• Plan sprints so the team focuses on decisions rather than obvious tasks.
• Balance review load and empower team autonomy.
• Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product, Design, and Engineering.
• Handle critical issues and deliver timely releases for QA.

Skills

Kotlin

Kotlin Coroutines

Kotlin Flow

Dagger 2

MVVM

Clean Architecture

Background Services

Music Player Service

Android animations

Jetpack Navigation

JUnit tests

Background audio

Communication skills

Product design intuition

AI agent collaboration

Tools

Android Studio

Job description

Speechify, a remote-first company, is seeking an Android Team Lead to own core product features end-to-end and drive how the team delivers with a hands-on coding focus.

You will review PRs, ensure reliability of key features, and streamline release processes while mentoring engineers and collaborating with Product and Design. The role emphasizes strong Kotlin expertise and experience with background audio workloads.