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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, articles, and websites into audio. The company's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base has grown faster than the engineering organization. You will join a ~200-person fully distributed team with no office, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you own core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The role is explicitly split: you will write code, review code, and own features—this responsibility does not diminish when you take the position. The other half involves the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
Key responsibilities include owning major features end-to-end from decision through release; maintaining and improving reliability metrics for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; unblocking teammates stuck on problems; consolidating duplicate solutions; keeping shared code tested and clear; calling when the team needs to change how it works; reducing manual intervention in releases; solving recurring problems systematically; shifting verification left through automation; running planning focused on decisions rather than clear work; determining appropriate review levels by area; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and feature releases; 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. You will work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through excellent technical skills and consistent, fast delivery.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock solid expertise in 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
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Informed view on which changes need heavy review versus light 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, not only personal AI usage
- 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, or NodeJS experience.
