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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 has ~200 employees distributed globally with no physical offices. Speechify's 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 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'll continue writing and reviewing code while also owning the team's processes and output. The split is intentional: you'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, and unblock teammates. You'll also notice systemic problems (e.g., when three people solve the same problem separately) and drive consolidation, improve release automation, shift verification left with better testing, run planning focused on decisions rather than execution, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features with design collaboration; maintaining and improving reliability metrics; providing high-quality code review; unblocking stuck teammates; consolidating duplicate solutions; keeping shared code tested and clear; calling when the team's process needs to change; reducing manual work in releases; preventing recurring problems through systemic fixes; growing automated verification; running planning that prioritizes decision-making; determining review requirements by risk; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds for QA; and developing early-career engineers.
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
**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 assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review 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 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
