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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store. You'll join a 100% distributed team of ~200 people globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role for the Android Core Product team. You will own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design and product. The role explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also raising team standards and unblocking work.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end and maintain reliability metrics for key features
- Review pull requests with feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when solutions should be consolidated across the team
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated; reduce duplication
- Drive process improvements: shift verification left, reduce manual release steps, improve planning
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and own feature releases
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
- Lead team planning to focus attention on work requiring decisions rather than clear tasks
The company emphasizes a flat structure where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll be expected to handle the "unpopular half" of the job: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
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 how to approach writing tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with 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
- 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.
