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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 the code you write and features you own end-to-end; the other half comes from eliminating friction, standardizing solutions, unblocking teammates, and improving how the team works.
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 substantive code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut 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 with learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and call when the team is ready to change how it works
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing the friction that follows. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with unpopular leadership decisions and the friction they create
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Portfolio of team-wide contributions, not just personal productivity gains
- 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 app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
