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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. 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, owning features end-to-end. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, maintaining shared infrastructure, and driving process improvements.
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 high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock the team by identifying and resolving blockers
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than clear-cut 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements (e.g., shift-left verification, automated testing)
- Establish review standards based on system risk, not blanket rules
The role emphasizes technical depth, product intuition, and the ability to drive organizational change while maintaining hands-on contribution.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or long-running background work
- Understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including limitations of automated tests
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that persisted after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with organizational friction: asking teams to change how they work and managing the resulting resistance
- Principled view on which changes require heavy review vs. lighter touch, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools/systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or Node.js experience
