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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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 no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on manager. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team-level responsibilities. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you ship, and half from the structural work that doesn't happen on its own.
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 feedback that helps people learn, not just approve PRs
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when the same issue appears twice and fix the underlying cause
- Consolidate duplicated work—when three people solve the same problem separately, decide which version the team uses
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Improve the release process to reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with work they can learn from
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
The role emphasizes technical excellence, solid communication, and the ability to drive change even when it creates friction. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical skill and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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 tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in 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 your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions or maintenance
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
