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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees across a fully distributed, office-free organization, Speechify is hiring a Team Lead for Android Core Product.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base has grown faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will write code, review code, and own features yourself—the leadership work is the other half of your impact, not a replacement for it.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should consolidate
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated; eliminate duplicate implementations
- Lead team process improvements and call when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes; shift verification left with automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to grow
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about process is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges from 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
- 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 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 the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on 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 how you do personally
- 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, or NodeJS experience.
