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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, 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 is growing faster than the engineering organization can keep pace. You will join a fully distributed, ~200-person team that includes engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role focused on Android core product development. You will own major features end-to-end, from decision through release, while continuing to write and review code. The role balances individual contribution with team leadership: roughly half your impact comes from the code you write and features you ship; the other half comes from raising team standards, eliminating duplicate work, unblocking teammates, and improving how the team operates.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and ship major features end-to-end, working closely with design and product teams
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help teammates learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and establish shared patterns
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention in builds
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than execution details
- Shift verification left by expanding automated testing and checks
- 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 and ensure they have learning opportunities
- Lead process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
The company emphasizes that this is not a role for someone who wants to stop building. You will continue shipping features and writing code; the leadership aspect is about multiplying team impact through better processes, clearer standards, and unblocking others.
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: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit testing
- Proven experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Deep understanding of testing: what to test, how to test it, and what can't be covered by automated tests
- Track record of introducing practices or tools to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing them, with honest reflection on the effort required
- Comfort with the difficult parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- Ability to reason about which changes need heavy review and which don't, based on system behavior
- Demonstrated ability to build things your team actually uses, not just tools that made you personally faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you work individually
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
