Before he joined us at Audible, David Buonomano was commuting to work a whopping three hours each way, a few times each week. “Audiobooks completely changed how I experienced that time,” he says. “I was actually looking forward to getting back into a story on the drive. I’ve been an Audible listener ever since.”

About eight years ago, David was hired as the Technical Program Manager (TPM) lead for the Audible on Alexa team. “It combined two of my favorite technology products that I used every single day, so it was my dream job,” he says. As a TPM, he builds roadmaps, removes blockers, and coordinates different tech teams as they work to make the Audible experience even better. Currently he’s the TPM lead for Audible’s multi-format program, overseeing the building of features that let people move easily between audiobooks, ebooks and print — features like Whispersync for Voice, Immersion Reading and the team’s most recent release, Page Sync.

With Page Sync, you can open the Audible app, point your phone’s camera at a page of your book, and the app will jump right to that part of the audiobook so you can seamlessly switch to listening. “Page Sync is one more way to say, however you like to read or listen, we’ll meet you there,” David explains.

Features like Page Sync rely on the efforts of Software Development Engineers like James Cavallo. For James, his connection to Audible started in a dorm room instead of a driver’s seat: as a student at Colgate, he listened to textbooks and Project Hail Mary on Audible while working on his computer science degree. Then he interned with us in the summer of 2022. “All I wanted was to come back to Audible full‑time — I really did like it that much,” he says. In fact, when he did accept a full-time offer, he chose to work on the same iOS team he interned with.

Eventually James moved from SDE I to II, which meant shifting from “taking tickets” and fixing issues to being able to create his own projects and systems. For instance, when he was listening to Audible on the subway, he noticed he’d lose network connection at certain stretches, so he pushed to improve that for his fellow iOS users. This is why it helps to be an avid user of the product you’re working on, he says: “You’re really invested in it.”

Ask James and David what’s great about a feature like Page Sync and the conversation quickly turns to people. Says James, “I think the engineering challenge is really cool, and we’re using bleeding-edge tech,” but for him, it’s even more personal than that. “My grandpa is 91, and he can’t read the book’s text so well anymore, so he listens to Audible. But sometimes, he still really likes to read. So this lets him go back and forth. This tech makes books more accessible to everyone.”

David has his own perfect use case in the family. “My sister flies through ebooks but also listens while she’s driving.” He adds, “Page Sync is part of a bigger promise: you should be able to consume your book in whatever format works for you at that moment, and we’ll handle the switching.”

To do that, Page Sync uses a technology called OCR, or optical character recognition, to “read” the printed page, picking up the letters and words so the app can understand what it’s looking at and match it to the right audio files. James says, “The OCR tech that we use has gotten a lot better,” in terms of reading data in different layouts and font sizes. “That was a big part of the testing process, ensuring that the OCR worked in different situations.”

That’s the first part. The second part is the app matching that text with our Immersion Reading sync files — when you’re using Immersion Reading, the Audible app highlights text, word by word, as the audio plays. Page Sync builds on this existing technology to switch between reading and listening.

That would be impossible without Audible’s culture of documentation, says David, “meaning design, documentation, playbooks” that allow teams to build on and expand previous projects. “Good documentation means a project doesn’t die when priorities change,” he continues. “Two years later another team can pick it up, understand why decisions were made, and reuse the right pieces instead of starting from scratch. One of the things I love about Audible is that we’re given the time to do things properly.”

For David, doing things properly translates outside of work as being in the woodshop, building furniture and cabinetry. “I grew up working with my hands in a family business, and this lets me keep doing that, but without any stress or deadlines.” He points out that many people in tech “like to build things.” They’re also apparently really active: When James isn’t training for the New York City Marathon, which is in November, he’s rock climbing and biking to work. “I also read a lot in my free time,” he adds. “My girlfriend and I compare books and read them together.”

Of course, Page Sync has been a full cross‑team production, with David coordinating across iOS and Android teams, tech content, and the multi‑format and devices teams who keep everything working across platforms. Layered on top of that were product managers, UX and research, and product marketing, “who supported our go‑to‑market plan and communication with external publishing partners as well,” David notes. He points out that it takes a large web of teams to make something that feels as simple as “scan a page and press play” actually work.

Together, David and James are living proof that the people working on the Audible experience are also listeners and readers, turning all the in‑between moments of their own lives into time with a good book. As David puts it, “It’s a special feeling to work on a product that literally got you through years of commuting.”

See open Technology roles at Audible