Lead Learning Designer

About us

Our mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language.

Learning a language can change a life by opening doors to new cultures, careers, and communities. Two billion people around the world are actively trying to learn a language, but the best way to learn (one-on-one tutoring) is hard to access at scale and hasn’t been meaningfully improved in decades. Speak is building a human-level, AI-powered tutor in your pocket: a conversation-first experience that lets learners actually speak, get instant feedback, and progress through carefully designed lessons. The result is a complete path from beginner to confident speaker across multiple languages.

Speak first launched in South Korea in 2019, where Speak has now become the number one language learning app, and we now serve learners across many markets and 15+ languages. Speak is one of the world’s leading AI companies, with over $150m raised in venture investment from OpenAI, Accel, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and more, with a distributed team across San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana.

About This Role

We’re looking for a Lead Learning Designer to strengthen and elevate one of Speak’s largest markets: Spanish. You’ll bring firepower to the team to enable us to move faster, try new things, and deliver best-in-class Spanish learning experiences at scale.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with your Learning Design team members, Product, Engineering, Analytics, Business Operations, and Marketing to help shape the future of our Spanish program. You will be expected to lead high priority Spanish curriculum projects with minimal guidance.

If you’re a Spanish pedagogy expert with a solid track record at an ed tech company who can execute end-to-end independently and thrives in creative, cross-functional work, we’d love to meet you.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own the Spanish curriculum and high-priority content projects end-to-end—delivering high-quality lessons and experiences on time through clear planning, proactive communication, and strong execution.

• Lead cross-functional projects with EPD and Marketing as the Spanish content DRI; bring holistic content perspectives, operational rigor, and creativity to test new learning experiences.

• Bring strong judgment to complex cross-language initiatives—understanding varying implications between languages, identifying risks early, and proactively asking the right questions to keep projects on track.

• Create curriculum and prototype content for A/B tests to drive higher user engagement, conversion, and efficacy.

• Partner with Learning & Curriculum, EPD, Marketing, Analytics, and Biz Ops to shape a cohesive, hypothesis-driven Spanish content strategy that drives measurable learner outcomes.

• Work with AI: consistently experiment with AI tools, prototype new workflows, and partner with internal AI teams to improve AI-assisted content generation—driving major efficiency and quality gains across Spanish content.

• Mentor and coach junior team members and contractors.

What We’re Looking For

• Native-level proficiency in English

• 4+ years of Spanish curriculum design at an ed tech company

• Deep expertise in Spanish pedagogy and spoken fluency development

• Exceptional user empathy and strong creative instincts — able to craft content that balances engagement, pedagogy, and what resonates with learners

• Strong content analytics intuition: able to identify which engagement and learning metrics matter and translate insights into curriculum improvements

• Strong writing, editing, and content creation skills, with the ability to ship high-quality lessons independently and make sound decisions with minimal oversight

• Strong technical fluency with modern tools and ability to ramp quickly on new systems

• Operationally strong: excellent project management, ability to juggle multiple work streams, and comfort working in fast-paced environments

• Track record of collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams (e.g., Product, Engineering, Business Operations/Analytics, Marketing)

• Creative and resourceful problem solver: enjoys prototyping new content approaches and thinking outside the box to solve learner problems even under constraints

• Effective communicator and collaborator who builds trust across teams and with leadership

Bonus points for:

• People management experience

• Experience with LMS tools

• Willingness to be based in San Francisco

Why work at Speak

1. Join a fantastic, tight-knit team at the right time: we're growing very quickly, we've most recently raised our Series C from some of the top investors in the valley, and we've achieved product-market fit in our initial markets. 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 over 40 countries and launching in a number of new markets soon. We have dedicated offices in San Francisco, Ljubljana, Seoul, and Tokyo, 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.

Speak does not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.