SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 30,000 - 90,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, articles, and web content into audio. The company recently won Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple's Design award for inclusivity. With ~200 employees across a fully distributed, office-free organization, Speechify is looking for a Team Lead to own core product work on its Android app—the most-used text-to-speech app in the Play Store.
This is a hands-on role with a clear split: you will write code, review code, and own features yourself. The leadership component focuses on the work that doesn't happen automatically: identifying when multiple team members have solved the same problem separately, deciding which approach the team should standardize on, and ensuring the team's time goes toward decisions that actually need to be made. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership emerges through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
Key responsibilities include owning major features end-to-end from decision through release; maintaining and improving reliability metrics; providing code review that teaches, not just approves; unblocking teammates stuck on problems; consolidating duplicate solutions; keeping shared code tested and maintainable; driving process improvements; reducing manual work in release pipelines; automating verification to shift left; running planning focused on high-impact decisions; defining review requirements by risk; participating in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; handling critical issues and nightly builds for QA; and mentoring early-career engineers.
The role requires comfort with the unpopular parts of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows. You'll need to build things your team actually uses, not just tools that make you personally faster. The company emphasizes work ethic, solid communication, and obsession with winning.
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 cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on 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 personal experience
- 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.
