SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and Speechify operates as a fully distributed, 100% remote organization with ~200 employees globally.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own technical contributions. The leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, consolidating duplicated work, improving processes, 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
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone has been stuck for two days and help directly
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard, and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification so QA sees confirmation, not discovery
- When the same problem appears twice, fix the underlying setup to prevent a third occurrence
- Run planning so the team focuses on work needing decisions, not work already clear
- Determine review requirements by area; establish who must sign off on what
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, provide nightly builds to QA
- Ensure junior engineers get learning-rich work and time to learn from it
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about team processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll need comfort with the unpopular 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
- 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from 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 app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
