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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Google named Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year, and Apple awarded it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store, with user growth outpacing the team's development velocity. This is a hands-on Team Lead role focused on owning core product work and elevating team processes and execution.
This is explicitly a hybrid IC/leadership position. You will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain a significant individual contribution. The leadership portion involves: eliminating duplicate work across the team, standardizing solutions, running planning focused on high-impact decisions, unblocking teammates, improving reliability metrics, reducing manual release processes, and developing junior engineers.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features from decision through release in collaboration with design; maintaining and improving reliability for key features; providing thoughtful code review; identifying and resolving team blockers; consolidating shared infrastructure; driving process improvements; automating verification and testing; running planning sessions; establishing review standards; participating in cross-functional Product/Design/Engineering discussions; handling critical issues and nightly QA builds; and mentoring early-career engineers.
The role emphasizes technical leadership grounded in systems thinking: understanding what the system does, recognizing when the same problem appears multiple times, and driving structural changes rather than repeated manual fixes. The team is flat and meritocratic; leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while remaining hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including recognition of what cannot be tested
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that persisted after you stopped championing it, with honest reflection on adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Principled perspective on which changes require heavy review vs. lighter touch, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to articulate 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 specifications
- Self-directed approach to improving the app and codebase beyond outlined scope
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
