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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, articles, and web content into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office.
You will lead Speechify's Android app—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store—as a hands-on Team Lead. This is not a management-only role. You will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and spend roughly half your time on individual technical contribution and half on team leadership and process improvement.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when the same problem appears multiple times and fix the root cause
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes: reduce manual intervention, shift verification left, automate what can be checked
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions that still need to be made
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor junior engineers, ensuring they get learning opportunities and time to develop
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements; be comfortable with the friction that comes from asking people to change how they work
The role emphasizes technical excellence, product intuition, and the ability to lead without stepping away from hands-on work. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical skill and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong 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 effective tests, including awareness of what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something 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 how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not just things that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you work personally
- 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 project experience
- iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience
