Team Lead, Android Core Product

About the Position

Team Lead, Android Core Product - Rotterdam, Netherlands

Remote

The mission of Speechify is to make sure that reading is never a barrier to learning. Over 50 million people use Speechify's text-to-speech products to turn whatever they're reading – PDFs, books, Google Docs, news articles, websites – into audio, so they can read faster, read more, and remember more.

Our Android app is the most used text-to-speech app in the Play Store, and the user base has grown faster than the way we build for it. We're looking for a Team Lead to own core product work and to raise how the team works around it.

This is a hands-on role, and we want to be clear about the split. You'll be writing code, reviewing code, and owning features of your own - that doesn't shrink when you take this job. The rest of it is the part that doesn't happen on its own: catching when three people have solved the same problem separately, deciding which version everyone should use, and making sure the team's time goes to the work that actually needs a decision. If you want to stop building, this isn't the role. If you want the code you write to be the smaller half of your impact, it is.

We are a flat organization that allows anyone to become a leader by showing excellent technical skills and delivering results consistently and fast. Work ethic, solid communication skills, and obsession with winning are paramount.

Responsibilities

• Own major features end to end, working closely with our design team - from the decision through to release.
• Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features.
• Review pull requests and give the kind of feedback people learn from, not just approval.
• Unblock the team: notice when someone has been stuck on the same thing for two days, and go take a look yourself.
• Notice when something one person built should become the version the team uses, and see that change through.
• Keep the shared pieces in working order - tested, clear enough for someone else to pick up, and consolidated when three versions of the same thing appear.
• Call it when the team is ready to change how it works, rather than waiting for that to happen on its own.
• Reduce how much manual intervention it takes to get a correct release out.
• When the same problem shows up twice, get the underlying setup changed so there isn't a third time.
• Shift verification left: grow what can be checked automatically so the nightly build going to QA is a confirmation rather than the first time anyone finds out.
• Run planning so the team's attention goes to the work that still needs decisions rather than the work that's already clear.
• Work out how much review each area needs, and where a person always signs off regardless.
• Participate in discussions across Product, Design, and Engineering, and bring the team's constraints into those rooms early.
• Handle critical issues, own feature releases, and provide nightly builds for the QA team.
• Make sure the people early in their careers are getting work they can learn from, and the time to learn from it.

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.
• Some 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.
• A track record of building things the rest of your team actually used, not only things that made you faster.
• The ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally.
• Product design intuition, user empathy, and the 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.

Nice to Have

• Building, maintaining, or contributing to open source Android projects.
• Experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.

Technologies we use

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

Interview Process

Several technical interviews plus an assessment on a real codebase. We aim to complete the process within 1 week. Use the tools you use every day. A good part of the process is a walkthrough where you talk through your reasoning - why this approach, what you considered and dropped, where you were unsure.

We Offer

The Netherlands Based Salary range for this role is: 30,000-120,000 USD/Year + Bonus + Stock depending on experience.

About the Company

Speechify is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Speechify does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.