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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, 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 is growing faster than the engineering team can keep pace. You'll join a fully distributed, ~200-person team with no physical office, including engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford PhD programs, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
This is a hands-on Team Lead role where you own core product work while raising team standards and processes. The role is explicitly split: you'll write code, review code, and own features yourself—that responsibility doesn't shrink when you take the job. The other half is the work that doesn't happen on its own: catching when three people have solved the same problem separately, deciding which version the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that actually need to be made.
You'll own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design. You'll own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features. You'll review pull requests with feedback people learn from, not just approvals. You'll unblock teammates stuck on problems, consolidate duplicated work, and keep shared pieces tested and clear. You'll call when the team is ready to change how it works. You'll reduce manual intervention in release processes, shift verification left by growing automated checks, and run planning so attention goes to work that still needs decisions. You'll participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early. You'll handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for QA. You'll ensure junior engineers get work they can learn from and the time to learn.
The organization is flat; anyone can become a leader by showing excellent technical skills and delivering results consistently and fast. Work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning are paramount. Some engineers will be skeptical about how the team is asked to work—that skepticism tends to be specific and worth acting on, and those raising it are often the right ones to hand the underlying problem to.
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 the importance of tests and how to approach writing them, including what can't be covered by them
- Something you introduced to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, and an honest account of what it cost to get there
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work, and living with the friction that follows
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from what the system does
- Track record of building things the rest of 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 further than the spec asks for
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond what's outlined in the spec
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
