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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 Play Store. Speechify operates as a 100% distributed company with ~200 employees globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stanford.
You will lead the Android Core Product team as a hands-on Team Lead. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself, while also handling team leadership responsibilities. The leadership portion focuses on reducing friction and enabling the team: identifying when multiple engineers have solved the same problem separately and consolidating solutions, running planning so the team's attention goes to decisions rather than clear work, unblocking stuck engineers, maintaining reliability metrics, improving the release process, and ensuring junior engineers get learning opportunities.
Key responsibilities include owning major features end-to-end from decision through release; maintaining and improving reliability for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; noticing when the team needs process changes and driving those changes; keeping shared code tested and consolidated; reducing manual work in the release pipeline; shifting verification left through automation; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds for QA; and developing junior engineers.
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from 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
- Strong expertise in 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 cannot 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 asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building things the team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents
- 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.
