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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 write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on team coordination, process improvement, and unblocking work rather than traditional people management.
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 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 change
- Maintain shared code pieces: ensure they're 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 intervention in release processes
- Implement systemic fixes when the same problem appears twice
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA receives confirmation builds, not discovery builds
- Run planning focused on work requiring decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and identify necessary sign-offs
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Ensure junior engineers receive learnable work and time to learn from it
The company values skepticism from engineers about how work is organized and encourages acting on specific concerns.
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 cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with 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/NodeJS experience.
