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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's 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 who continues to write and review code while elevating team execution.
This is explicitly a hybrid IC/manager role. You will own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics for key features, and provide technical code review that teaches rather than merely approves. You will unblock teammates, consolidate duplicate solutions, and drive process improvements—noticing when the team is ready to change how it works and seeing those changes through. You will reduce manual intervention in release processes, shift verification left by expanding automated checks, run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work, and ensure junior engineers receive learning opportunities.
You will participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early. You will handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for QA. The role emphasizes technical leadership: catching when three people have solved the same problem separately, deciding which version the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually requires a decision.
Speechify is a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The culture is flat; leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 AI usage
- 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.
