Remote Android Core Product Lead (Hands-on)

Canaan Partners; United States; Remote; USD 30,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Speechify is seeking an experienced Android Team Lead to own core features end-to-end, write code, review peers, and guide the team’s approach to release quality software. This hands-on role emphasizes delivering features, improving reliability, and mentoring junior engineers in a distributed, remote setup.

You’ll lead with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Android best practices, coordinating with Product, Design, and Engineering to ship high-impact updates for our Android platform.

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.
• Some 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 the kind of feedback people learn from, not just approval.
• Unblock the team: notice when someone has been stuck on the same thing for two days, and go take a look yourself.
• Notice when something one person built should become the version the team uses, and see that change through.
• Keep the shared pieces in working order — tested, clear enough for someone else to pick up, and consolidated when three versions of the same thing appear.
• Call it when the team is ready to change how it works, rather than waiting for that to happen on its own.
• Reduce how much manual intervention it takes to get a correct release out.
• When the same problem shows up twice, get the underlying setup changed so there isn't a third time.
• Shift verification left: grow what can be checked automatically so the nightly build going to QA is a confirmation rather than the first time anyone finds out.
• Run planning so the team's attention goes to the work that still needs decisions rather than the work that's already clear.
• Work out how much review each area needs, and where a person always signs off regardless.
• Participate in discussions across Product, Design, and Engineering, and bring the team's constraints into those rooms early.
• Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for the QA team
• Make sure the people early in their careers are getting work they can learn from, and the time to learn from it

Skills

Team leadership

Kotlin & Android

Background services

Testing approach

Change management

AI integration

Product design intuition

Self-motivation

Communication skills

Open source experience

UI/UX focus

Tools

Kotlin

Jetpack Compose

Room

Dagger 2

JUnit

Job description

Speechify is seeking an experienced Android Team Lead to own core features end-to-end, write code, review peers, and guide the team’s approach to release quality software. This hands-on role emphasizes delivering features, improving reliability, and mentoring junior engineers in a distributed, remote setup.

You’ll lead with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Android best practices, coordinating with Product, Design, and Engineering to ship high-impact updates for our Android platform.