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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, news 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 ~200-person fully distributed team (no office) with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, Stripe, Vercel, and other high-growth companies.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you'll own core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The role explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own delivery—while also handling the work that doesn't happen on its own: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and improving 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 high-quality code reviews that teach, not just approve
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish team standards
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual intervention in release processes
- Shift verification left by growing automated testing coverage
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut 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 learning opportunities
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication skills, and drive to win are paramount. You'll work with a team that values skepticism and acts on specific feedback about processes.
Technologies: Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Jetpack Navigation, Dagger 2, Room, Jetpack Compose, JUnit, custom views with Canvas & Paint.
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 how to write tests, including awareness of what can't be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in 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 the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
