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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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 physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the team's development velocity.
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 the team's technical direction and workflow. The role balances individual contribution (owning major features end-to-end, writing code, reviewing pull requests) with team leadership (unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate shared code and eliminate duplication when multiple versions of the same solution emerge
- Improve the release process to reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than already-clear 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 improvements to the app and codebase beyond spec requirements
The team operates in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll be expected to push back on process changes that don't make sense and live with the friction that follows.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin skills: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy—what can and cannot be covered by automated tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior, not just intuition
- Demonstrated ability to build tools and systems that your team actually uses, not just things that made you personally 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 the spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase independently
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
