About us

Our mission is to teach the next billion people English and become the de facto way people learn languages.

English is the global language of business, culture, and communication, and over 1.5 billion people around the world are actively trying to learn right now. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to learn to speak a language without constant access to a speaking partner. Grammar and vocab apps don’t really help – you need to actually converse with someone.

Speak is on a journey to fix this. We’re creating an AI-powered experience that replicates the flow of a conversation, without needing a human on the other end. The goal is to make it radically more accessible to be able to have conversations in English and eventually help hundreds of millions of people gain fluency who otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

We started on this journey over four years ago and we’ve still got a long ways to go. We’re thoughtfully adding new team members only when we think they can truly play a big role in our mission.

Speak is currently live in South Korea where we have quickly grown to become the top grossing education app in the country. We recently launched in Japan as well and are expanding to more markets in the coming months. The company is well funded, raising a recent Series B backed by investors like OpenAI, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, and others. We’re a team of just under 40 based primarily in SF, Seoul, and Ljubljana.

About this role

We are looking for a senior front-end focused but full-stack capable engineer to work on building novel AI-powered product experiences. The ideal candidate will have experience working in close coordination with product, design, and machine learning teams, as well as have a background in building polished consumer applications. This role sits at the center of developing our newest products focused on programmatic, conversationally-driven language learning and will be an instrumental contributor to the future of our company.

What you’ll be doing

• Building novel AI-driven product experiences and user interfaces on the web, mostly the mobile web

• Creating delightful and polished front-end user experiences, interfaces, and interactions

• Rapidly creating and iterating on highly performant and native-feeling product experiences in webviews within native mobile apps

• Owning the entire development cycle of features, from conception to production

• You’ll be able to write code very quickly, ship frequently, and make a huge impact on our business by helping us scale our content

What we’re looking for?

• 8+ years of experience building highly polished web-based product experiences, including extensive experience with React

• You appreciate balancing doing things the "right way" but also can build things scrappily if necessary

• You enjoy shipping things quickly and frequently

• You’re an excellent communicator and enjoy collaborating with people across all functions

• Nice to have:

  • Experience building native-feeling mobile webview interfaces

  • Experience building delightful consumer product experiences (e.g. custom animations)

Why work at Speak

1. Join a fantastic, tight-knit team at the right time: we’re growing super quickly, we just raised our Series B from some of the top investors in the valley, and we’ve achieved product-market fit. You’d join at a magical time when a single person could significantly change the course of the company.

2. Do your life’s work with people you’ll love working with: we care strongly about our craft and want every person at Speak to feel like they’re growing every day. We believe in the idea that working with people you both enjoy and have respect for makes everything better. We hire thoughtfully and only work with people we admire deeply.

3. Global in nature: We’re live in South Korea and Japan, and launching in a number of new markets soon. We have dedicated offices in San Francisco, Ljubljana, and Seoul, and you’ll have the opportunity to talk to users in each of these regions on a regular basis as well as travel.

4. Impact people’s lives in a major way: Learning a language is one of the single most life-changing skills one can learn and right now 99% of people never achieve their goal because the process is broken. We’re helping millions of people achieve their goals and improve their lives.