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Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people globally 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 team can keep pace. You'll join a 100% distributed, ~200-person 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 and review code, own features end-to-end, and maintain your own delivery velocity. The leadership half focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, and improving how the team operates.
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 code review that teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Consolidate duplicate implementations and establish team standards
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Run planning sessions focused on decisions rather than clear 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 learning-focused work assignments
- Drive process improvements: shift verification left, automate checks, reduce nightly surprises
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. You'll work in a distributed setting with no physical office, and the culture values work ethic, communication, and a drive to win.
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 how to write tests, including what can't be covered by them
- 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 and which don't, 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 how you do personally
- 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.
