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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / annual
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 globally in a fully distributed setting, with team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced development velocity. You'll lead the core product team as a hands-on manager who continues writing and reviewing code while elevating team execution.
This is explicitly a hybrid role: roughly half your time is individual contribution (owning features end-to-end, writing code, reviewing PRs), and half is team leadership (unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, running planning, mentoring junior engineers).
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's process needs to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the root cause
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and surface team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with meaningful work and learning time
- Develop a view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are core values.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it (with honest reflection on the cost)
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools/systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Can describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal workflow
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-driven to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
