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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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
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 leadership responsibilities. The split is intentional: you'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, and unblock teammates. You'll also standardize shared components when multiple versions emerge, improve the release process, shift verification left with automated testing, run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features with design collaboration; maintaining and improving reliability for key features; providing high-quality code reviews; noticing and resolving blockers; consolidating duplicate solutions; keeping shared code tested and clear; calling when the team's processes need to change; reducing manual work in releases; preventing recurring problems through systemic fixes; growing automated verification; running planning that prioritizes decision-making; determining review requirements by risk; participating in cross-functional Product/Design/Engineering discussions; handling critical issues and nightly QA builds; and developing junior engineers.
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often valid and worth investigating. You'll need comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong expertise in 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 cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on 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 personal experience
- 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
