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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
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, while also handling the leadership work that doesn't happen on its own: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and driving process improvements.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock the team by identifying and resolving blockers
- Consolidate shared pieces and eliminate duplicate implementations
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning focused on work requiring decisions
- 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 team process improvements and handle the friction that comes with change
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about how the team works is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned 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 expertise in 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 how to approach writing tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- 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 the job: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
