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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Google named Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year, and Apple awarded it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, with user growth outpacing the team's development velocity. You will join as Team Lead to own core product work and elevate how the team operates.
This is explicitly a hands-on role. You will write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain technical depth. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members solve the same problem separately, standardizing on the best approach, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns the team uses
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than already-clear 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
- Lead process improvements and handle the friction that comes with asking people to change how they work
Speechify operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values 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 how to approach writing tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- 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:
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
