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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 fully distributed, 100% remote 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 a hybrid role: you'll write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not diminish when you take the job. The leadership portion focuses on work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made rather than routine execution.
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 teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine 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, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
The company values skepticism from engineers about how the team works and treats it as specific, actionable feedback worth acting on.
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 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 reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in 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 your personal approach
- 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.
