SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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 Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly not a role where you stop coding—you'll continue writing and reviewing code while also owning the team's technical direction and workflow. The role balances individual contribution with team leadership: roughly half your impact comes from code you write, and half from unblocking the team, standardizing solutions, improving processes, and mentoring.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end, from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when the same problem appears twice and fix the underlying cause
- Consolidate duplicate solutions across the team and decide which version everyone should use
- Improve release processes: reduce manual intervention, shift verification left, automate what can be checked
- 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, ensuring they get learning opportunities
- Drive process improvements and call for changes in how the team works when needed
The company emphasizes a flat structure where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll work in a distributed environment with strong communication and a bias toward action.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin skills: 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
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to reason about which changes need heavy review and which don't, based on system behavior
- History of building things your team actually used, not just tools that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined requirements
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
