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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 continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team leadership responsibilities. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from code you write and features you own end-to-end; the other half comes from unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving team processes, and ensuring the team's time 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
- 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 change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated—eliminate duplicate implementations
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning so team attention goes to decisions, not already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities and time to develop
The company values flat structure, technical excellence, work ethic, communication, and winning. You'll work in a 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
- 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review and which don't, 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 how you do personally
- 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 contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
