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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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the team's development pace.
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 while also owning the team's technical direction and processes. Your impact splits between direct technical contribution (owning major features end-to-end, reviewing pull requests, maintaining reliability metrics) and team leadership (unblocking engineers, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving release processes, running planning, mentoring junior engineers, and driving process improvements).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members and identify when someone is stuck
- Consolidate shared code and eliminate duplicate solutions
- Improve release automation and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop junior engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Drive process improvements and call for team-wide changes when needed
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The culture is flat and meritocratic—leadership comes from demonstrating 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 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 write 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 reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you work personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open-source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
