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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 distributed globally with no physical offices. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity.
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 that multiplies the team's effectiveness.
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 code review feedback that helps engineers learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that consolidation
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team's process needs to change rather than waiting for organic evolution
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and improve automation
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work in a 100% distributed setting with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Deep expertise in Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for it, with honest reflection on the adoption cost
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Principled views on which changes require heavy review based on 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 specification
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
