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Salary: USD 30,000 - 160,000 / 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 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 which approach the team should standardize on, 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 code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice and help when someone has been stuck for two days
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Maintain shared code pieces: keep them tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate what can be automated
- When a problem appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so the nightly QA build is confirmation, not discovery
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area; identify where sign-off is always needed
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers, ensuring they get learnable work and time to learn
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. The team values skepticism about processes—engineers who raise concerns are often the right people to hand the underlying problem to.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by tests
- Evidence of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest reflection on the cost to adoption
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- A 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 project experience (building, maintaining, or contributing)
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
