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Salary: USD 30,000 - 75,000 / 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 globally in a fully distributed setting, with no office. Speechify'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 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 will write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not shrink. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which solution the team standardizes on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made rather than work that's already clear.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate yourself
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code in working order: tested, clear, and consolidated when duplicates appear
- Call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so nightly QA builds confirm rather than discover issues
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Determine review requirements by area and ownership
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Ensure junior engineers get learning-rich work and time to learn from it
Speechify operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. The company values skepticism from engineers and often assigns underlying problems to those who raise concerns.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest accounting of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open-source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
Interview process includes several technical interviews plus assessment on a real codebase, aiming to complete within one week. You'll use your own tools; a significant portion is a walkthrough where you explain your reasoning, what you considered and rejected, and where you were uncertain.
