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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 Google Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity.
You will join as Team Lead for Android Core Product in a fully distributed, 100-person global organization. This is explicitly a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while taking on leadership responsibilities. You will own major features end-to-end, write and review code, maintain reliability metrics, and guide team processes.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning major features from decision through release, working closely with design
- Reviewing pull requests with mentoring-focused feedback
- Unblocking teammates and consolidating duplicate solutions across the codebase
- Improving release automation and shifting verification left (expanding automated testing)
- Running planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution clarity
- Participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handling critical issues and providing nightly builds to QA
- Developing early-career engineers through thoughtful work assignment and learning time
- Identifying when team processes need to change and driving those changes despite friction
The role emphasizes technical leadership in a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. You will balance hands-on coding (described as "the smaller half of your impact") with the organizational work that doesn't happen automatically: noticing when problems recur, standardizing solutions, and improving how the team works.
Speechy has received recognition including Google's Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design Award for Inclusivity (2025).
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin proficiency: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including recognition of what cannot be tested
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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 aspects of leadership: asking teams to change how they work and managing the resulting friction
- Ability to reason about which code changes require heavy review versus lighter review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader 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 specification
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus qualifications:
- Open source Android project contributions
- Experience with iOS, Web, or Node.js
