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Salary: USD 30,000 - 120,000 / 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, and the user base has grown faster than the engineering organization. You will join a fully distributed team of ~200 people globally, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD researchers, and founders.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role focused on owning core Android product work while raising team standards and processes. The position explicitly combines individual contribution with leadership: you will write code, review code, and own features while also driving team-level improvements. Leadership responsibilities include reducing duplication when multiple team members solve the same problem, deciding on standardized approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to work requiring decisions rather than routine execution.
Key responsibilities include: owning major features end-to-end from decision through release; maintaining and improving reliability metrics for key features; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; unblocking teammates stuck on problems; consolidating shared pieces and preventing duplicate implementations; calling when the team needs to change how it works; reducing manual intervention in release processes; automating verification to shift left; running planning focused on decision-critical work; determining appropriate review levels for different code areas; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds for QA; and mentoring early-career engineers.
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication skills, and competitive drive are paramount. The role requires comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Deep 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 limitations of automated tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce practices to a team that stick after you stop pushing them, with honest assessment of adoption costs
- Comfort with organizational change management and the friction it creates
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools and systems your team actually uses, not just personal productivity gains
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal AI usage
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond specifications
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
