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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 was named Chrome Extension of the Year by Google and received Apple's Design award for inclusivity in 2025. With ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, Speechify operates with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, with user growth outpacing the team's development velocity. This Team Lead role is hands-on: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and drive how the team operates. The split is intentional—code you write remains a significant part of your impact, but the other half involves preventing duplicate work, standardizing solutions, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
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 feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive that change
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works rather than waiting for organic change
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Shift verification left by growing automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on work that needs decisions, not work already clear
- Define review requirements by area and identify who must sign off
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to grow
The company values skepticism from engineers about how work is organized; such feedback is often specific and worth acting on, and the people raising it are often the right ones to solve it.
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 approach, including what can't be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, plus honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and living with the friction
- A 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 the app and codebase beyond what's outlined
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
