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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-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between individual technical contributions (owning major features end-to-end, maintaining reliability metrics, providing code review) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, running planning, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock the team by identifying blockers and solving them directly
- Consolidate shared pieces and eliminate duplicate implementations
- Improve release automation and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers and ensure they have learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and call for changes in how the team works
The role emphasizes technical depth, product intuition, and the ability to lead through influence in a flat organization. You'll work with a skeptical, high-performing team and need comfort with the friction that comes from asking people 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 expertise in 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 automation
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to determine which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
