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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 across a fully distributed, office-free organization. The 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 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 will write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not shrink. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which solution the team standardizes on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; dive in yourself when needed
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Maintain core shared infrastructure—tested, documented, consolidated
- Recognize when the team's working process needs to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems so issues don't recur
- 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
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
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 automation
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 only personal AI usage
- 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.
