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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. Speechify's Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store, and the user base is growing faster than the engineering team's capacity to build for it.
You will join as Team Lead for Android Core Product, owning major features end-to-end while remaining hands-on. This is explicitly a hybrid role: you will write and review code, own features, and deliver shipping work—but you will also spend significant time on team leadership activities that don't happen automatically: eliminating duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, unblocking teammates, improving processes, and running planning so the team focuses on decisions rather than execution details.
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 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 three versions of the same thing)
- Call when the team needs to change how it works
- Reduce manual work in the release process
- Shift verification left: grow automated checks so QA confirms rather than discovers
- Run planning focused on decisions, not clear work
- Determine review requirements by system constraints, not by person
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds to QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to learn
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges from technical excellence and consistent delivery.
**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 approach, including what tests cannot cover
- Demonstrated ability to introduce 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 managing the friction that follows
- 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 outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
**Bonus:**
- Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects
- Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS
