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Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / 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 fully distributed, ~200-person team as Team Lead for Android Core Product.
This is a hands-on leadership role with a deliberate split: you'll continue writing and reviewing code and owning features, but the leadership portion focuses on unblocking the team, standardizing solutions, and improving how the team works. You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, maintain reliability metrics, provide code review that teaches, and unblock teammates stuck on problems. You'll consolidate duplicate work across the team, improve release automation, shift verification left with automated checks, run planning focused on decisions rather than execution, and ensure junior engineers get learning opportunities.
You'll participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early. You'll handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for QA. The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
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
- 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 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 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 things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
