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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 the user base has grown faster than the engineering organization. You will join a ~200-person fully distributed team that includes engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you will own core product work while raising team standards and processes. The role explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you will write code, review code, and own features, while also handling the work that doesn't happen on its own—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, 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 high-quality code reviews that help people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations 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 work in the release process and shift verification left
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than 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 learning opportunities
The company values flat structure, technical excellence, work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning. You'll work in a 100% distributed setting with no office.
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 approach writing tests, including what can't be covered by them
- 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 managing the friction that follows
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on 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 how you do 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 contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
