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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, 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'll continue writing and reviewing code while also leading team coordination and technical direction. You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics for key features, and provide code review that helps engineers learn. You'll unblock teammates, consolidate duplicated solutions, improve shared infrastructure, and drive process improvements—such as shifting verification left and reducing manual release steps. You'll run planning focused on decisions rather than execution clarity, participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities.
The role emphasizes technical leadership without stepping away from hands-on work. You'll notice when the team needs process changes, handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA. You'll also mentor engineers and bring technical constraints into product discussions early.
Speechy has received recognition including Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity (2025). The company is 100% distributed with no office.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong 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 approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- 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 aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal experience
- 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.
