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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 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 while also owning the team's technical direction and process. The split is intentional: roughly half your time on individual contribution (owning features end-to-end, writing code, reviewing pull requests), and half on the work that doesn't happen on its own (eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, improving team processes, and ensuring knowledge transfer).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates 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 three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team's process needs to change, rather than waiting for organic evolution
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear 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 learning-focused work and time to grow
- Develop team capability around AI agents
Speechy is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. The company has received recognition from Google (Chrome Extension of the Year) and Apple (Design award for inclusivity, 2025).
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 approach, including what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something 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 living with the 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 personal experience
- 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: Open source Android contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
