Software Engineer, Platform

<p>The mission of Speechify is to make sure that reading is never a barrier to learning.</p> <p>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. Speechify’s text-to-speech reading products include its iOS app, Android App, Mac App, Chrome Extension, and Web App.&nbsp;Google recently named Speechify the Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple named Speechify its 2025 Design Award winner for Inclusivity.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Today, nearly 200 people around the globe work on Speechify in a 100% distributed setting – Speechify has no office.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Overview</strong></p> <p style="text-align: left;" data-speechify-sentence="">The Platform team owns the backend behind everything Speechify ships: the public TTS API,&nbsp;payments, subscriptions, auth, consumption tracking, and analytics — serving over 50&nbsp;million users across iOS, Android, Mac, Chrome, and web.</p> <p style="text-align: left;" data-speechify-sentence="">These are systems where correctness compounds. Subscription state has to stay consistent&nbsp;across five clients and two app-store billing systems that each go quiet at the worst moment.&nbsp;Consumption metering has to be exact enough to bill on and cheap enough to run at our&nbsp;request volume. The public TTS API has external customers with their own products&nbsp;depending on our latency and uptime. None of this degrades gracefully — it is either right, or&nbsp;someone gets charged twice.</p> <p data-speechify-sentence="">The job is to make your own job smaller. Every system you own here should need less of&nbsp;you a year from now than it did the day you took it, and the reward for that is a larger one.&nbsp;That is the entire growth path on this team — there is no separate ladder, and no ceiling&nbsp;except the one you stop raising. We are a flat organization: people become leaders here by&nbsp;taking scope and being right about it, fast.</p> <p><strong>What Yo</strong><strong>u’</strong><strong>ll Do</strong></p> <ul> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Design, build, and own the APIs behind payments, subscriptions, auth, consumption&nbsp;tracking, and our public TTS API</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Take on services you didn't write and make them faster, cheaper, and harder to break</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Establish that a change is correct before it ships, and leave behind the checks that keep it&nbsp;correct after you've moved on</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Automate the parts of your role that shouldn't need a person, then go take on what that&nbsp;freed you up for</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Turn work you've done once into work the whole team can repeat</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Design B2B and enterprise integrations for customers building on top of us</li> <li data-speechify-sentence="">Work with product, mobile, and web to keep backend architecture ahead of where the&nbsp;product is going</li> </ul> <p><strong>An Ideal Candidate Should Have</strong></p> <ul> <li>Proven backend experience in TS/Node (required)</li> <li>Direct experience with GCP; working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or another cloud</li> <li>A habit of giving away work you used to own, and something to show for the room it&nbsp;created</li> <li>A daily working setup with AI agents you can describe in detail — what runs unattended,&nbsp;what you review, and where you've decided it doesn't get to act alone</li> <li>The instinct to check a result against the system itself — logs, database state, the actual&nbsp;request — rather than against a summary of it</li> <li>Judgment about what not to build, and the ability to say plainly why you dropped it</li> <li>A preference for being corrected over being right</li> <li>Preferred: Docker and containerized deployments</li> <li>Preferred: deploying high-availability applications on Kubernetes</li> </ul> <p><strong>Interview process</strong></p> <p>Several technical interviews plus a take-home assessment on a real codebase. We aim to&nbsp;finish within a week.</p> <p>The assessment runs in two stages: you'll submit, get real feedback from an engineer on this&nbsp;team, and have time to act on it. Use the tools you use every day. You'll be asked to walk&nbsp;through your reasoning, so bring it.</p> <p data-speechify-sentence=""><strong>What We Offer </strong></p> <ul> <li>A dynamic environment where your contributions shape the company and its products</li> <li>A team that values innovation, intuition, and drive</li> <li>Autonomy, fostering focus and creativity</li> <li>The opportunity to have a significant impact in a revolutionary industry</li> <li>Competitive compensation, a welcoming atmosphere, and a commitment to an exceptional asynchronous work culture</li> <li>The privilege of working on a product that changes lives, particularly for those with learning differences like dyslexia, ADD, and more</li> <li>An active role at the intersection of artificial intelligence and audio – a rapidly evolving tech domain</li> </ul> <p><strong>Think you’re a good fit for this job?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Tell us more about yourself and why you're interested in the role when you apply. <br>And don’t forget to include links to your portfolio and LinkedIn.</p> <p><strong>Not looking but know someone who would make a great fit?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Refer them!&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Speechify is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace.&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>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.</p>