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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 in 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
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning sessions focused on work requiring decisions
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements
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 operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface area while remaining hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what cannot be tested
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stick after you stop pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with organizational friction and change management
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the team actually uses
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-driven approach to improving the app and codebase
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
