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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. Speechify operates as a fully distributed, 100% remote company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you will continue writing and reviewing code while also owning team leadership responsibilities. The role focuses on raising team standards and eliminating friction in how the team works.
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 engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Maintain shared code: ensure it's tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's working process needs to change and lead that change
- Reduce manual work in the release process; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying cause
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than execution details
- 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, ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Work with team skepticism constructively; often the people raising concerns have good solutions
The company emphasizes that this is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount.
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 assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, 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 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 contributions; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
