SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / 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. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and spend roughly half your time on technical work. The other half focuses on team coordination, process improvement, and unblocking engineers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide thoughtful code review that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and investigate
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Maintain shared code: ensure it's tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Solve recurring problems at the root level
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- 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 appropriate learning opportunities
- Develop team processes for code review depth by area
The company values flat structure, technical excellence, work ethic, communication, and competitive drive. You'll work with skeptical engineers; their concerns are usually specific and worth acting on.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including what can't 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 the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just things that made you faster
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
**Bonus:**
- Open source Android project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
