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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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
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 managing team dynamics, architecture decisions, and delivery. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from code you write, and half from unblocking the team, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires decisions.
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 code review feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learnable work and time to grow
The company values skepticism from engineers about how work is organized; those concerns are often specific and worth acting on.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, 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
- 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 managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on 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 just 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/NodeJS experience.
