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Salary: USD 30,000 - 100,000 / 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 Google Play Store, and the user base has grown faster than the engineering organization. You will join a fully distributed team of ~200 people globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you will own core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The role explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you will write code, review code, and own features, while also handling the work that doesn't happen on its own—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, 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 thoughtful code review that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish shared patterns
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Drive process improvements when the team is ready to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- 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 with appropriate 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'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
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 including Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Strong understanding of testing approaches, including what can and cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear perspective on which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the team actually used
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not just personal experience
- 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, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
