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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
The 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 as Team Lead to own core product work and elevate how the team operates.
This is explicitly a hands-on role. You'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions—that responsibility doesn't shrink. The leadership portion focuses on work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members solve the same problem separately, standardizing on the best approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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 feedback that helps people learn, not just approve changes
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice patterns and solve them systematically
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared standards
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on work requiring decisions, not already-clear tasks
- 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-focused work and time to grow
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements
Speechy values flat organization and technical leadership. You'll be expected to push back on processes that don't work and live with the friction that comes with change.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership 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
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them (with honest assessment of the cost)
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, grounded in system behavior
- Built things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Can describe how your team works with AI agents, not just your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-driven to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
