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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 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 eliminating friction: catching when multiple engineers solve the same problem separately, standardizing on the best approach, ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need human judgment, and removing blockers.
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 systemic issues and drive fixes
- Consolidate duplicate solutions and keep shared code tested, clear, and maintainable
- Lead team planning to focus attention on work requiring decisions, not routine execution
- Reduce manual work in the release process; shift verification left with automated 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 with meaningful work and learning time
- Drive process improvements and help the team adapt how it works
Speechy is a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. The company values work ethic, communication, and a drive to win. You'll work in a distributed setting with no physical office.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and strategy, including what tests cannot cover
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest reflection on the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- A principled view on which changes need heavy review versus light review, grounded in system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems that the team actually adopted, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only your personal approach
- 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, or NodeJS experience.
