Software Engineer, Platform - Arlington, VA, USA Arlington, VA, USA

Speechify; Arlington, Northern (VA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Stock options

Asynchronous work culture

Job summary

Speechify is hiring a Platform Software Engineer to design, build, and own the backend APIs powering payments, subscriptions, auth, and the TTS service. You’ll optimize performance, reduce costs, and ensure reliability across multiple clients and platforms.

The role emphasizes autonomous work, AI-assisted tooling, and collaboration with product, mobile, and web teams to keep the backend architecture ahead of product needs.

Qualifications

• Proven backend experience with TS/Node
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Ability to design robust APIs and scalable services

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own the APIs behind payments, subscriptions, auth, and the public TTS API
• Improve existing services to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable
• Ensure changes are correct with accompanying tests and checks
• Automate repetitive tasks and create reusable components
• Collaborate with product, mobile, and web teams to keep backend architecture aligned with product growth

Skills

TS/Node

GCP

AI/automation mindset

Observability/logs debugging

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS/Azure

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Software Engineer, Platform - Arlington, VA, USA

Arlington, VA, USA

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. Speechify’s text-to-speech reading products include its iOS app, Android App, Mac App, Chrome Extension, and Web App.Google recently named Speechify the Chrome Extension of the Year and Apple named Speechify its 2025 Design Award winner for Inclusivity.

Today, nearly 200 people around the globe work on Speechify in a 100% distributed setting – Speechify has no office.

Overview

The Platform team owns the backend behind everything Speechify ships: the public TTS API,payments, subscriptions, auth, consumption tracking, and analytics — serving over 50million users across iOS, Android, Mac, Chrome, and web.

These are systems where correctness compounds. Subscription state has to stay consistentacross five clients and two app-store billing systems that each go quiet at the worst moment.Consumption metering has to be exact enough to bill on and cheap enough to run at ourrequest volume. The public TTS API has external customers with their own productsdepending on our latency and uptime. None of this degrades gracefully — it is either right, orsomeone gets charged twice.

The job is to make your own job smaller. Every system you own here should need less ofyou a year from now than it did the day you took it, and the reward for that is a larger one.That is the entire growth path on this team – there is no separate ladder, and no ceilingexcept the one you stop raising. We are a flat organization: people become leaders here bytaking scope and being right about it, fast.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and own the APIs behind payments, subscriptions, auth, consumptiontracking, and our public TTS API


• Take on services you didn't write and make them faster, cheaper, and harder to break


• Establish that a change is correct before it ships, and leave behind the checks that keep itcorrect after you've moved on


• Automate the parts of your role that shouldn't need a person, then go take on what thatfreed you up for


• Turn work you've done once into work the whole team can repeat


• Design B2B and enterprise integrations for customers building on top of us


• Work with product, mobile, and web to keep backend architecture ahead of where theproduct is going

An Ideal Candidate Should Have

• Proven backend experience in TS/Node (required)


• Direct experience with GCP; working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or another cloud


• A habit of giving away work you used to own, and something to show for the room itcreated


• A daily working setup with AI agents you can describe in detail – what runs unattended,what you review, and where you've decided it doesn't get to act alone


• The instinct to check a result against the system itself – logs, database state, the actualrequest – rather than against a summary of it


• Judgment about what not to build, and the ability to say plainly why you dropped it


• A preference for being corrected over being right


• Preferred: Docker and containerized deployments


• Preferred: deploying high-availability applications on Kubernetes

Several technical interviews plus a take-home assessment on a real codebase. We aim tofinish within a week.

The assessment runs in two stages: you'll submit, get real feedback from an engineer on thisteam, and have time to act on it. Use the tools you use every day. You'll be asked to walkthrough your reasoning, so bring it.

What We Offer

• A dynamic environment where your contributions shape the company and its products


• A team that values innovation, intuition, and drive


• Autonomy, fostering focus and creativity


• The opportunity to have a significant impact in a revolutionary industry


• Competitive compensation, a welcoming atmosphere, and a commitment to an exceptional asynchronous work culture


• The privilege of working on a product that changes lives, particularly for those with learning differences like dyslexia, ADD, and more


• An active role at the intersection of artificial intelligence and audio – a rapidly evolving tech domain

The United States Based Salary range for this role is: 140,000-200,000 USD/Year + Bonus + Stock depending on experience

Think you’re a good fit for this job?

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And don’t forget to include links to your portfolio and LinkedIn.

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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.

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