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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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. Speechify operates as a fully distributed, 100% remote company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that need to be made, and raising how the team operates.
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 someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-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 and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to learn
Speechy operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and drive to win are paramount. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those who raise concerns.
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 tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review vs. 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.
