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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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company'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 organization can keep 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, owning features end-to-end, while also providing technical leadership and team coordination. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you write; the other half comes from catching duplicate solutions across the team, standardizing on the best approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually requires decision-making rather than execution of already-clear tasks.
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 approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help and step in
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that consolidation
- Maintain shared code components: ensure they're tested, clear, and consolidated when duplicates emerge
- Call when the team's working processes need to change rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- 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, ensuring they get learning opportunities and time to grow
- Develop a view on which code changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
Speechy operates as a flat, 100% distributed organization with ~200 people globally and no physical office. The team includes engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
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
- Proven 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 a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus 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 versus light review based on system behavior
- History of building tools/systems that your team actually adopted, not just things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you work individually
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Open source Android contributions
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
