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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 ~200-person fully distributed team that includes engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you'll own core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The role explicitly balances individual contribution with leadership: you'll write code, review pull requests, and own features yourself—this responsibility doesn't shrink when you take the job. The leadership half involves eliminating duplication (noticing when three people solve the same problem separately and consolidating), unblocking teammates, improving team processes, and ensuring the team's time goes to work that actually requires decisions.
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 stuck teammates; consolidating shared pieces and eliminating redundant implementations; calling when the team needs to change how it works; reducing manual intervention in the release process; automating verification so QA confirms rather than discovers; running planning focused on decision-making work; determining review requirements by area; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds; and mentoring early-career engineers.
The company emphasizes a flat structure where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You'll work in a 100% distributed setting with no office.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Clear view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, argued from 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/NodeJS experience.
