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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 engineering velocity. You'll join a 100% distributed team of ~200 people, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role focused on Android core product development. You'll own major features end-to-end from conception through release, working closely with design and product teams. The role is explicitly split: you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also handling the leadership work that doesn't happen automatically—identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, consolidating approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and ship major features end-to-end, with real delivery accountability
- 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 into shared, tested, maintainable components
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than clear-cut 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Lead team process improvements, including how the team works with AI agents
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The role requires comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface area 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
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including what tests can and cannot cover
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with organizational change management and the friction it creates
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- History of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond the spec
- Excellent communication skills
**Bonus:**
- Open source Android contributions or maintenance
- iOS, Web, or Node.js experience
