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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 continue writing and reviewing code while also managing team dynamics, architecture decisions, and process improvements. The company describes this as a "flat organization" where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Maintain and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide high-quality code reviews that help engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard and drive adoption
- Maintain shared code: ensure it's tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Lead process improvements: recognize when the team's working methods need to change
- Reduce manual work in the release pipeline; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying cause
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers, ensuring they get learning opportunities
The role emphasizes that you will spend roughly equal time writing code and on leadership/process work. The company values skepticism from engineers and expects you to act on specific concerns about how the team works.
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 cannot be covered by tests
- Demonstrated ability to introduce a practice or tool to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it; honest assessment of the cost to adoption
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Principled view on which changes need heavy review vs. light review, based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools/systems that the team actually used, not only things that made you personally faster
- 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 spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
