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Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people globally 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, and the user base is growing faster than the team's development capacity.
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 operational excellence. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you ship, and half from the team coordination work that doesn't happen on its own.
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 code review feedback that helps people learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help and step in
- Consolidate duplicated work—when three people solve the same problem separately, decide which version the team uses
- Keep shared infrastructure tested, clear, and consolidated
- Drive process improvements: notice when the team's workflow needs to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning so the team focuses 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
Speechy is a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, Stripe, Vercel, and Bolt. The culture is flat; leadership emerges through 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
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing strategy—what can and cannot 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
- Clear reasoning about which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- History of building tools and 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 requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
