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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 fully distributed, 100% remote 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-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between direct technical contribution (owning major features end-to-end, reviewing pull requests, unblocking teammates) and team leadership (running planning, standardizing shared components, improving processes, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features 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 stuck on problems; notice when solutions should be standardized across the team
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left: grow automated testing so QA confirms rather than discovers issues
- 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 nightly QA builds
- Ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities and time to grow
- Drive team process improvements and call when the team is ready to change how it works
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often valid and worth acting on. 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
- 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 testing importance and how to write tests, including what can't be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort 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 contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
