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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 is growing faster than the engineering organization can keep pace. You'll join a fully distributed team of ~200 people globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role for the Android Core Product team. You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design and product. The role is explicitly split between individual contribution (writing and reviewing code, owning features) and team leadership (unblocking teammates, standardizing shared components, improving processes, mentoring junior engineers).
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end with real delivery accountability, not oversight
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock the team by identifying stuck work and diving in yourself
- Consolidate duplicated solutions and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- 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 nightly QA builds
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements and team working agreements
The company emphasizes a flat structure where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll work with a skeptical, high-caliber team and are expected to handle friction when proposing changes to how the team works.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Expert-level Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Shipped and maintained background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing philosophy and practice, including test limitations
- Track record of introducing practices to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Principled views on code review rigor based on system behavior
- History of building tools and patterns your team actually adopted
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal practices
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase proactively
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
