Software Engineer, Platform - Irvine, CA, USA Irvine, CA, USA

Speechify; Irvine, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Impactful work

Autonomy

Competitive compensation

Asynchronous culture

AI + Audio domain

Job summary

Speechify is seeking a Platform Software Engineer to own the backend for payments, subscriptions, auth, and the public TTS API. You will help scale a distributed system serving millions across iOS, Android, Mac, Chrome, and web.

Ideal candidates have proven TS/Node backend experience, strong GCP knowledge, and comfort with Docker and Kubernetes. This is a fully remote, async-friendly role emphasizing ownership and robust, scalable design.

Qualifications

• Proven backend experience in TS/Node (required).
• Direct experience with GCP; working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or another cloud.
• Habits of handing over ownership with measurable results.
• Daily setup with AI agents; describe unattended runs and reviews.
• Checks against system state—logs and actual requests—over summaries.
• Judgment on what not to build and why you dropped it.
• Preference for Docker/containerized deployments.
• Preference for deploying high-availability apps on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own APIs behind payments, subscriptions, auth, consumptiontracking, and our public TTS API.
• Improve performance, cost, and resilience of services you inherit.
• Ensure correctness before shipping and maintain checks after you move on.
• Automate repetitive work to empower the team to focus on higher-impact tasks.
• Turn one-off work into reusable components for the team.
• Design B2B and enterprise integrations for customers building on us.
• Collaborate with product, mobile, and web teams to keep backend architecture ahead.

Skills

TS/Node

GCP

AWS/Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

AI agents

Log analysis

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GCP

AWS/Azure

Job description

Software Engineer, Platform - Irvine, CA, USA

Irvine, CA, 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, consumptiontracking, 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

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.

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.