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Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / 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. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
You will lead the Android core product team as a hands-on manager. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding. You will write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not shrink. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately and consolidating approaches, deciding which solution the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward work that genuinely needs a decision 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
- Provide code review feedback that helps people learn, not just approval
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; actively debug and help when needed
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and maintainable
- Identify when the team's processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left (automate what can be checked before QA)
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine work
- Determine appropriate review rigor for different code areas
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning opportunities and time to grow
Speechy 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 in a fully distributed environment with no office.
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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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
- Track record of building tools/practices the team actually uses, not just personal productivity gains
- 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 the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
