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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / 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 Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team can keep pace. You'll join a fully distributed, ~200-person team with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you'll own core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The role is explicitly split: you'll continue writing and reviewing code and owning features, but you'll also spend significant time on team-level work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple engineers have solved the same problem separately, deciding on standardized approaches, 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
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps people learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and drive solutions
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning focused on work requiring decisions, not work already clear
- 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 process improvements and handle the friction that comes with asking teams to change how they work
Speechy has won Chrome Extension of the Year (Google) and a Design award for inclusivity (Apple, 2025). The company operates with a flat structure where leadership emerges through excellent technical skills and consistent delivery.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by automation
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool 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 resulting friction
- Clear perspective 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 personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specifications
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS:
- Open source Android project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
