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Salary: USD 30,000 - 115,000 / 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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. 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 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 process. Your 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 code review feedback that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that consolidation
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- When the same problem appears twice, fix the underlying setup to prevent a third occurrence
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify critical sign-off points
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning work and time to grow
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. 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
- Strong expertise in 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 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 living with resulting friction
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, 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 how you work personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
