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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, 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 team's development 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 will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding on a unified approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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 high-quality code reviews that help people learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; dive in yourself when needed
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Maintain and improve shared infrastructure—tested, clear, and consolidated
- Recognize when the team's working practices need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems so issues don't recur
- 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 meaningful work and learning time
Speechify operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and a drive to win. You'll work in a distributed, asynchronous environment with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and other high-growth companies.
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
- Strong understanding of testing approaches, including what can and cannot be covered by automated 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 aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Clear perspective on which changes require heavy review versus lighter review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- 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 specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android project contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
Interview process includes several technical interviews plus assessment on a real codebase, typically completed within one week.
