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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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 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 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 will write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not diminish. The leadership part consists of the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately and consolidating to one approach, deciding which version the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually requires a decision.
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 code review feedback that helps people learn, not just approve/reject
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; actively help when needed
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Maintain shared code: ensure it's tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's working processes need to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate what can be automated
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left: expand automated checks so the nightly QA build is confirmation, not discovery
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify where sign-off is always needed
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers, ensuring they get learning-rich work and time to learn
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. The company values skepticism from engineers about how the team works—that skepticism is usually specific and actionable.
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
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in 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 just your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android project experience (building, maintaining, or contributing)
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
