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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, Stanford PhD programs, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on manager. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself, while also managing team dynamics, preventing duplicate work, making architectural decisions, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that requires human judgment.
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 high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's process needs to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the root cause
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor junior engineers, ensuring they get learning opportunities and time to grow
- Develop team capability around AI agents
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 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 how to write tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review 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
- 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; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
