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Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / annual
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'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 fully distributed, ~200-person team as Team Lead for Android Core Product.
This is explicitly a hands-on role where you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also leading team coordination and process improvements. You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, and unblock teammates. You'll notice when multiple engineers have solved the same problem separately and consolidate to a single team approach. You'll improve release automation, shift verification left with better testing, run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities.
You'll participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early. You'll handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA. The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll help the team adopt AI agents effectively and push Android UI/UX beyond specifications.
Speechy has received recognition including Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity (2025). The company operates with a flat structure where leadership emerges through technical excellence 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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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 perspective 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.
