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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, Speechify is hiring a Team Lead for Android Core Product to own the development and evolution of its most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store.
This is a hands-on leadership role with a clear split: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility does not diminish. The other half involves eliminating friction: catching when multiple team members solve the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team standardizes on, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that genuinely needs a decision. You will own major features end-to-end from conception through release, maintain and improve reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, unblock teammates, consolidate duplicated solutions, and drive process improvements. You'll reduce manual intervention in releases, shift verification left through automation, run planning focused on high-impact decisions, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities. You'll also participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early, and handle critical issues and nightly QA builds.
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing 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
- Strong 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 approach, including limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated track record of introducing practices to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with organizational change management and the friction it creates
- Ability to differentiate which changes require heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- 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 beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
**Bonus:** Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
