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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. 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 not a management-only role—you will continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team-level responsibilities. Your impact splits between individual contribution (owning major features end-to-end, writing code, reviewing pull requests) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, consolidating duplicate solutions, improving processes, mentoring junior engineers, and running planning).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems so issues don't recur
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities and time to grow
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the harder parts of leadership: 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
- 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 how to write effective tests, including awareness of what can't be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it (with honest reflection on the cost)
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just tools that made you personally 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; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
