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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 Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team can keep pace.
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 the team's technical direction and process. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you ship, and half from the organizational and technical leadership you provide.
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 high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates when they get stuck; notice systemic problems and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve the release process, reducing manual intervention and shifting verification left
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution details
- 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, ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The company operates as a flat organization where technical excellence and consistent delivery are the path to leadership. Work ethic, communication, and a drive to win are paramount. You'll work with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and other high-growth startups.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin skills: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Shipped and maintained 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
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them; honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Clear reasoning about which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Built things the team actually used, not only things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-driven to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
