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Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, articles, and web content 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 fully distributed, ~200-person team that includes engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford, operating with no physical office.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role focused on owning core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The position explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own delivery velocity. The leadership half involves eliminating duplication across the team, consolidating shared infrastructure, unblocking teammates, running planning that focuses on decisions rather than execution, and driving process improvements.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features from design through release; maintaining reliability metrics for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; noticing when team members are stuck and helping directly; identifying when one person's solution should become the team standard; keeping shared code tested and maintainable; calling when the team's working methods need to change; reducing manual work in the release process; shifting verification left through automation; running planning sessions; determining review requirements by area; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly QA builds; and ensuring junior engineers get learning opportunities.
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and strategy, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that persisted after you stopped advocating for it, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with the difficult aspects of leadership: requesting process changes and managing resulting friction
- Informed perspective on which changes require heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the broader team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only 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 outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
