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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to support it.
You will join as Team Lead for Android Core Product, owning the technical direction and team dynamics of the Android platform. This is explicitly a hands-on role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership portion focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made rather than routine execution.
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 that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them at the root
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Recognize when the team's processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions, not routine 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 meaningful work and learning time
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and a drive to win. You'll work with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe, Vercel, and Bolt.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team 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
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Clear reasoning about which changes need heavy review and which don't, grounded in system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build things your team actually uses, not just 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, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
