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 the design team

We’re a small, high-craft team of six working at the intersection of research, invention, and product thinking. We build consumer and B2B experiences used by millions across 150+ markets — and a lot of the work is genuinely novel: inventing how someone talks to an AI tutor, what feedback feels like when you’re learning out loud, and how progress should be measured and celebrated.

We stay close to learners through prototyping, interviews, betas, and experiments. We take craft seriously, iterate fast, and value a high-trust critique-and-build culture. We have something to prove — and design awards to win.

Role & responsibilities

Speak’s enterprise product is still early, but the problem is big: companies need to know whether their teams are actually building language proficiency, where learners are getting stuck, and what interventions will help. You’ll help define the tools they use to launch programs, understand progress, spot risks, and prove that language learning is working.

• Shape the strategy and design of our company-facing product — the admin, reporting, and account experiences the L&D managers who buy Speak rely on to launch, run, and prove their programs

• Turn complex learner progress, proficiency, and risk signals into reporting that L&D leaders can trust, understand, and act on

• Set the design foundation for a surface that's still early — closer to 0-to-1 than operating a mature product

• Quickly set up prototypes in AI tools or code to communicate concepts, build alignment, and pressure-test real experiences

• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, GTM, and Customer Success — translating what customers need to buy, launch, renew, and expand into product experiences that actually work

• Feel comfortable and creative in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment

What you’d actually work on depends on staffing — we’ll figure that out together once we’ve seen your work and understand where you’d have the most fun and impact. We’re excited about proving outcomes leaders trust, making complex workflows feel easy, and making Speak the most effective solution on the market.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of product design experience. You have experience designing in both consumer and B2B contexts.

• B2B / enterprise SaaS craft. You've designed admin consoles, dashboards, reporting, and complex multi-user workflows — not just consumer surfaces — and you're comfortable with roles, permissions, and account models.

• Systems and platform thinking. You treat the enterprise surface as a platform, designing so the product carries work that's done by hand today, rather than one-off screens.

• You stay close to users. You think about real people learning real languages in real contexts. You actively seek out the people using the product — not just the data about them — and turn what you learn into clear product direction.

• Product thinking and structured judgment. You frame the problem before solving it and know why you’re doing something. You can turn messy problems into a clear story: what matters, what tradeoffs we’re making, and why.

• AI-native workflow. You use AI as part of your design process to move faster, explore more directions, prototype, or sharpen your thinking. You’re excited to keep pushing what that can look like and bring the best parts to the rest of the team.

• Communication and stakeholder collaboration. You can own a room, build trust, and push back when something isn't right. You bring people into your work along the way knowing that multiple perspectives produce the strongest work.

We also love to see

• Experience in language learning, education, or another domain with deep cross-cultural product surface area

• Background in L&D, edtech, HR-tech, or enterprise analytics — you've lived in the buyer's world

• Global or multilingual enterprise experience — our priority accounts are Korea-led with multilingual cohorts

• A bias toward prototyping first, whether in code, AI tools, Figma, or whatever helps make the idea feel real

• A strong portfolio that demonstrates user-centric thinking, high craft, and innovative interaction patterns

• Contributions to design systems that scale beyond a single team

• A point of view on how agentic workflows can improve the design process, and comfort tinkering in code or AI tools to make ideas tangible

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.