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Salary: USD 30,000 - 60,000 / 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 no physical office. The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on 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 processes. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from code you write and features you own end-to-end; the other half comes from eliminating duplication, standardizing shared solutions, unblocking teammates, improving team processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually needs decisions rather than routine execution.
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
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates when they're stuck; notice systemic problems and fix them
- Consolidate when multiple versions of the same solution exist; standardize on the best approach
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process; shift verification left with automated checks
- Run planning so the team focuses on decisions rather than routine work
- Determine review requirements by area and ownership
- 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 opportunities
Speechify operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and a drive to win. You'll work with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
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 can't be covered by them
- Track record of introducing 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 managing the friction that follows
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, 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 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, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
