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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 has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office. Recent recognition includes Google naming Speechify Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple awarding it a Design award for inclusivity in 2025.
The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and user growth has outpaced the team's development velocity. You will join as Team Lead for Android Core Product, owning the technical direction and team dynamics of this critical surface.
This is explicitly a hands-on role. You will write code, review code, and own features—that responsibility does not diminish when you take the leadership position. The leadership half of your impact involves: catching when multiple engineers solve the same problem separately and consolidating to one approach; deciding which solutions the team standardizes on; ensuring the team's time goes to work that genuinely needs a decision rather than routine execution; and raising how the team operates.
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 teaches, not just approves
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice systemic issues and fix them
- Consolidate duplicated work and establish shared patterns
- Improve release processes and reduce manual intervention
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not routine work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions (Product, Design, Engineering) and bring technical constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time
- Call when the team needs to change how it works, rather than waiting for organic change
The company operates as a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery. Work ethic, communication, and competitive drive are paramount. You will work with engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and founders of high-growth startups.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid 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 how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest account of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of leadership: asking people to change how they work and living with resulting 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 app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; iOS, Web, or NodeJS experience.
