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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple awarding it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, with user growth outpacing the team's development velocity. You will join as Team Lead for Android Core Product, owning the technical direction and team dynamics of this critical surface.
This is explicitly a hands-on role. You will 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: identifying when multiple team members have solved 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 when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes to reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on work requiring decisions, not already-clear 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 appropriate learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and call for changes in how the team works
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
The company values flat structure, technical excellence, work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning. You'll work with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe, Vercel, and Bolt.
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 cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things the rest of 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:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
