Team Lead, Android Engineering (Remote)

Speechify is a remote-first company dedicated to making reading accessible through text-to-speech technology. Their products, including an iOS app, Android app, Mac App, Chrome Extension, and Web App, serve over 50 million users globally. The company has won awards like Google’s Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple’s Design Award for Inclusivity (2025).

The team is fully distributed, with 190+ engineers from backgrounds at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and top-tier programs like Stanford. They hire from high-growth startups like Stripe, Vercel, and Bolt.

Overview

The Android app is the most-used text-to-speech app on the Play Store, but the team is scaling faster than the development process. Speechify is seeking a Team Lead to oversee core product work and optimize team workflows.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll write code, review code, and own features end-to-end—this responsibility doesn’t diminish with the title. The other half of the role involves preventing redundant work, standardizing processes, and ensuring the team focuses on high-impact tasks. If you enjoy building, this role is for you. If you prefer oversight over coding, this isn’t the fit.

Speechify operates as a flat organization, where leadership emerges from technical excellence, consistent results, and a winning mindset. Work ethic, clear communication, and a drive to succeed are critical.What You’ll Do

• Lead major features from concept to release, collaborating closely with the design team.
• Monitor and improve reliability metrics for key features.
• Review pull requests with constructive feedback, not just approvals.
• Unblock team members by addressing bottlenecks proactively.
• Standardize solutions when multiple team members solve the same problem independently.
• Maintain shared codebases—ensuring they’re tested, documented, and consolidated.
• Initiate process improvements when the team is ready, rather than waiting for change.
• Reduce manual intervention in releases to streamline deployments.
• Address recurring issues by improving foundational systems.
• Shift verification left by expanding automated testing to reduce QA workload.
• Prioritize planning to focus the team on undecided work.
• Define review processes, ensuring critical sign-offs are in place.
• Engage with Product, Design, and Engineering teams, incorporating team constraints early.
• Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for QA.
• Mentor junior engineers, ensuring they receive meaningful learning opportunities.

An Ideal Candidate Should Have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership or ownership of major projects while staying hands-on.
• Proficient in Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, background services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit testing.
• Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or long-running services.
• Deep understanding of testing principles, including limitations and trade-offs.
• A track record of introducing lasting improvements to a team, with an honest account of challenges faced.
• Comfortability with unpopular tasks, such as asking for process changes and managing friction.
• A clear view on review intensity, based on system needs rather than personal preference.
• Experience building team-used tools, not just personal productivity hacks.
• Ability to describe team workflows with AI agents, not just personal processes.
• Product design intuition, user empathy, and a drive to exceed UI/UX specifications.
• Self-motivation to improve the app and codebase beyond specifications.
• Excellent communication skills.

Bonus

• Contributions to open-source Android projects.
• Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.

Technologies Used

• Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Jetpack Navigation, Dagger 2, Room, Custom Views, Canvas & Paint, Jetpack Compose, JUnit.