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’re looking for a senior backend engineer with extensive experience designing, building, and scaling complex, production-level backend systems from scratch. This is a role with enormous ownership and impact, with responsibility and ownership over key system design & architectural decisions. You will work very collaboratively with other full-stack, frontend, backend, and machine learning engineers, as well as product and design, to develop the systems that power our cross-platform applications.

What you’ll be doing

• Design, build, and scale backend systems that power major new parts of the Speak product

• Help design and scale our API service for our iOS and Android clients, our subscription and payments infrastructure, and more.

• Complete ownership and responsibility for clear and high quality system design documents and backend tech specs.

• Help us improve overall engineering efficiency and quality, and develop best practices as we scale the engineering organization

What we’re looking for?

• 6+ years of experience as a backend engineer

• Expertise in systems design and architecture

• Experience with our tech stack, which includes: Node.js, Typescript, GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL

• Experience setting a strong foundation of backend engineering tooling & processes: build & deployment process, CI/CD, monitoring and observability, etc.

• Exceptional written communication, particularly around writing great system design documents

• Strong bias towards execution speed while balancing maintainable systems

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.