An Engineering Manager at Speechify plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of audio content consumption. Speechify is dedicated to making reading accessible to everyone by transforming text into high-quality, natural-sounding audio. In this role, you will lead high-performing engineering teams that build, scale, and optimize cutting-edge text-to-speech engine integrations, mobile and desktop applications, and browser extensions. You are not just a people manager; you are a technical leader who ensures the seamless delivery of products that impact millions of users globally.

The complexity of this role lies in the intersection of advanced artificial intelligence, real-time audio streaming, and cross-platform client application development. You will guide your team through sophisticated technical challenges, such as minimizing latency in audio synthesis, optimizing client-side performance, and integrating complex machine learning models into production environments. Your leadership directly influences how quickly and reliably Speechify can deliver innovative features to its user base.

Success as an Engineering Manager requires a rare blend of deep technical expertise, exceptional product intuition, and robust people leadership. You will foster a culture of rapid execution, high technical standards, and continuous learning. By aligning engineering initiatives with broader business goals, you will empower your team to ship impactful features quickly while maintaining a clean, scalable, and resilient codebase.

The following questions are representative of what you can expect during the Speechify interview process. These questions are drawn from real interview experiences of candidates who have gone through the loop. They are designed to test your technical depth, hands-on coding ability, system design capabilities, and leadership philosophy.

Hands-on Technical & Coding

This category evaluates your ability to remain close to the code, debug complex issues, and build functional application components under time constraints.

• Implement a functional feature using React and TypeScript within a cloned repository, ensuring proper state management and performance.
• Walk through how you would debug a rendering performance bottleneck in a complex web application using only Chrome DevTools.

Preparing for an Engineering Manager role at Speechify requires a balanced approach that showcases both your technical prowess and your leadership maturity. You should expect a highly rigorous process that tests your ability to execute under pressure.

Technical Execution – You must demonstrate that you are still highly technical and capable of writing clean, production-ready code. Expect to be evaluated on your hands-on frontend skills (particularly React and TypeScript) and your ability to solve complex problems in minimalist environments.

System Design & Scalability – You need to show that you can design robust, scalable architectures. Focus on real-time data processing, latency reduction, and high-availability system design, as these are critical to Speechify's core product offerings.

Execution & Delivery – Interviewers will evaluate how you drive projects to completion. Be prepared to discuss how you manage timelines, mitigate risks, and maintain a high velocity of delivery without sacrificing code quality.

People & Culture Leadership – You must show alignment with a high-performance, FAANG-like culture. Be ready to demonstrate how you recruit top talent, foster psychological safety, manage performance, and inspire your team to achieve ambitious goals.

The interview process at Speechify is designed to be rigorous, thorough, and highly technical, closely mimicking the evaluation standards of top-tier technology companies. The company holds a very high bar for hiring engineering leaders, assessing both your hands-on technical capabilities and your strategic leadership skills.

The journey typically begins with an automated technical assessment. This stage is designed to filter for strong, hands-on coding fundamentals before you interact with the hiring team. Following the automated screen, you will advance to live technical rounds led by senior engineering leaders and directors. These rounds dive deep into live coding, system design, and practical debugging. The process concludes with comprehensive behavioral and leadership interviews that focus on your management style, execution framework, and cultural alignment.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial application to the final offer stage. Candidates should use this visual guide to pace their preparation, ensuring they allocate sufficient time to practice hands-on coding before the automated test, followed by deep dives into system architecture and behavioral frameworks for the later stages. While the exact duration can vary based on candidate availability and location, the sequence of evaluations remains highly structured.

Hands-on Frontend & Full-Stack Engineering

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to build real-world application features. Speechify values engineering managers who can jump into the codebase when necessary and guide their teams through complex implementation details.

Be ready to go over:

• React and TypeScript – Deep understanding of component lifecycles, hooks, state management, and type safety.
• Asynchronous Programming – Managing network requests, handling streaming data, and optimizing API interactions.
• Application Performance – Minimizing bundle sizes, optimizing rendering paths, and managing memory usage in modern web applications.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Custom React hooks design, Web Workers for offloading heavy computations, and native browser audio APIs.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Clone a GitHub repository, set up the environment, and implement a real-time word-highlighting feature that syncs with an audio playback stream."
• "Refactor a legacy React component to use modern state management patterns while improving its rendering efficiency."

Raw Problem Solving & Debugging

This area tests your resilience and ability to solve complex technical problems under constraints, sometimes using minimal tooling. It simulates high-pressure production debugging scenarios where standard IDE features might not be available.

Be ready to go over:

• Chrome DevTools – Advanced debugging, profiling memory leaks, analyzing network waterfalls, and inspecting performance bottlenecks.
• Core JavaScript/TypeScript – Algorithmic problem-solving, data structure manipulation, and DOM manipulation without external libraries.
• Error Handling – Identifying, isolating, and resolving edge-case bugs in complex application flows.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Analyzing heap snapshots, diagnosing event loop blockages, and reading minified production stack traces.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Identify and fix a memory leak in a web application that occurs when users continuously toggle the text-to-speech playback engine."
• "Write a JavaScript algorithm in a plain text editor to parse and chunk a large document into optimized text blocks for an AI voice synthesizer."

Behavioral & Leadership

This round evaluates your management philosophy, your ability to execute in a fast-paced environment, and your alignment with Speechify's high-performance standards.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict Resolution – Navigating disagreements within your team or with cross-functional partners like product and design.
• Performance Management – Identifying underperformance early, delivering constructive feedback, and executing performance improvement plans.
• Talent Acquisition & Mentorship – Hiring top-tier talent, onboarding effectively, and developing career paths for your engineers.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing remote, globally distributed teams across multiple time zones, and scaling engineering processes during rapid organizational growth.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Describe a time when you had to make a highly unpopular technical decision. How did you build alignment and ensure team buy-in?"
• "How do you handle a situation where a critical product launch is slipping, and your team is already working at maximum capacity?"