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Salary: USD 30,000 - 105,000 / 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 the user base is growing faster than the engineering team can keep pace. You'll join a 100% distributed, ~200-person team with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, Stripe, Vercel, and other high-growth companies.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you'll own core product work while raising team standards and processes. The role is explicitly split: you'll continue writing and reviewing code and owning features, but the additional leadership work involves eliminating duplicated solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, maintaining shared infrastructure, and driving process improvements. You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, and notice when the team needs process changes. You'll reduce manual work in releases, shift verification left through automation, run planning focused on decisions rather than clear work, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities. You'll also participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early, and handle critical issues and nightly QA builds.
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll need to build things the team actually uses, not just optimizations for yourself. The company values flat structure, technical excellence, work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning.
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 approach, including what can't 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 asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only personal optimizations
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal approach
- 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.
