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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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google 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, process, and culture. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you write and features you ship; the other half comes from eliminating duplication, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, improving reliability, and evolving how the team works.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from design through release, working closely with Product and Design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for critical features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Actively unblock teammates stuck on problems
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Consolidate shared infrastructure and eliminate duplicate implementations
- Recognize when the team's process needs to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and improve CI/CD
- Shift testing left: grow automated verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not execution clarity
- Define review rigor by system risk, not by role
- Bring engineering constraints into cross-functional Product/Design/Engineering discussions early
- Handle critical incidents and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with meaningful work and learning time
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and founders. The company has won Chrome Extension of the Year (Google) and Design Award for Inclusivity (Apple, 2025).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy: what tests cover, what they don't, and how to approach both
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the friction required
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools/practices your team actually adopted, not just 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 proactively
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
