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Salary: USD 30,000 - 65,000 / 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, and user growth has outpaced 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 process. The split is intentional: roughly half your impact comes from the code you ship, and half from the organizational and technical leadership that multiplies the team's output.
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 engineers learn and grow
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention and catch issues earlier
- 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 appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements: when a problem appears twice, change the underlying setup so it doesn't happen a third time
- Shift verification left by expanding automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
The company is 100% distributed with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and founders of their own companies. Speechify has won Chrome Extension of the Year (Google) and Design Award for Inclusivity (Apple, 2025).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- 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, not only personal experience
- 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
