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, news articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity. You'll join a 100% distributed, ~200-person team as Team Lead for Android Core Product.
This is explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while elevating team performance. You'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and spend roughly half your time on the leadership work that doesn't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and improving how the team operates.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate shared pieces and eliminate redundant implementations
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and shift verification left
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and surface team constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
Speechy values flat structure and believes leaders emerge through technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll work in a culture that welcomes skepticism about processes and empowers people to solve underlying problems.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests cannot cover
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for it, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change workflows and managing resulting friction
- Principled views on review rigor based on system behavior and risk
- History of building tools and systems your team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- 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-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
