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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 across a fully distributed, office-free organization. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on 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 own major features end-to-end from decision through release, write and review code, and maintain your own feature ownership. The leadership part—roughly half your impact—involves eliminating duplication when three people solve the same problem separately, standardizing on the best approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually requires a decision.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end with design collaboration, from conception through release
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help and step in
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Maintain shared infrastructure: ensure it's tested, documented, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team's process needs to change, rather than waiting for organic evolution
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left: automate checks so nightly QA builds confirm rather than discover
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Define review rigor by area and identify required sign-offs
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
The company emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about process is usually specific and worth acting on; those raising concerns are often the right people to own the fix.
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 tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy: what tests cover, what they don't, and how to approach both
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the difficult half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Demonstrated history of building tools your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just 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 beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open-source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
