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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 fully distributed, 100% remote 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 technical manager. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between direct technical contribution (owning major features end-to-end, reviewing pull requests, writing code) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, standardizing shared components, improving processes, running planning, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when team processes need to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the root cause
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- 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, ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Develop team capability around working with AI agents
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers is valuable; the best people raising concerns often have the solution.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin skills: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Proven 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
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it (with honest reflection on the cost)
- Comfort with the difficult 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/systems that your team actually adopted and used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
