SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 30,000 - 55,000 / 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'll join a 100% distributed, ~200-person team as Team Lead for Android Core Product.
This is explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also leading team-level work. You'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and drive systemic improvements. The leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, consolidating duplicated solutions, maintaining reliability metrics, improving release processes, and ensuring the team's time goes toward work that requires decisions rather than routine execution.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features from decision through release in collaboration with design; maintaining and improving reliability for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; unblocking teammates stuck on problems; identifying when one person's solution should become the team standard; keeping shared infrastructure tested and clear; calling when the team's working practices need to change; reducing manual work in the release process; shifting verification left through automation; running planning focused on decision-making; determining appropriate review levels by area; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds for QA; and mentoring early-career engineers.
The role emphasizes technical leadership in a flat organization where leadership emerges from excellent technical skills and consistent delivery. You'll need comfort with the unpopular parts 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
- 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 asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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 app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
