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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the 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, owning features end-to-end, while also handling the leadership work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying duplicate solutions across the team, standardizing on shared approaches, unblocking teammates, and driving process improvements.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for critical features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; step in hands-on when needed
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and surface team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process changes and handle the friction that follows
Speeify is a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and founders of high-growth startups. The culture emphasizes flat hierarchy, technical excellence, and results-driven delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or ownership of a major surface while remaining hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including awareness of testing limitations
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking teams to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes require heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools and patterns your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions or maintenance
- iOS, Web, or Node.js experience
