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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team can keep pace.
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, owning features end-to-end. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions across the team, standardizing on shared approaches, unblocking teammates, 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
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates and notice when someone is stuck
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning focused on work requiring decisions rather than clear tasks
- 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 and ensure they have learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those raising concerns.
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 can't be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just 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 app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
