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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 spend roughly half your time on individual contribution. The other half focuses on team coordination: eliminating duplicate work, standardizing solutions, unblocking teammates, improving processes, and ensuring the team's effort goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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 high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team's working practices need to change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- 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 learning-focused work and time to grow
The company emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll be expected to handle friction when asking the team to change how they work.
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
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Principled views on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools/systems your team actually used, not just things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- 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.
