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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 Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
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 write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires decisions rather than routine execution.
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
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Maintain shared code: keep it tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The company emphasizes a flat structure where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work in a distributed setting with no physical office.
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 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
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool 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 managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the 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 beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
