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 and mighty team of six that sit at the intersection of craft, research, invention and product thinking. We build consumer and B2B experiences that live in 150+ markets and are used by millions. The design work is genuinely novel — inventing how someone talks to an AI tutor, what feedback feels like when you're learning out loud, how a roleplay session should land emotionally, and how you measure a true proficiency score.

Our work shapes the future of incredible learning experiences and we partner closely with Engineering, Learning Design, Product, and Analytics to do it. We stay close to our users to build empathy and to how our experiences actually feel to use by prototyping in AI, testing out conversation design and voice interaction, and being comfortable with ambiguity.

Our team takes craft seriously and have a lot of fun doing it — we developed our design principles in a multi-week offsite and iterate on them on a living board in our office. We take language classes together to ground our work in first principles. We stay close to our learners through team trips to Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei as well as lighter touch interviews, surveys, betas, and AB tests. We believe in a critique and build culture with high trust and also get a bit competitive over ping pong. We have something to prove and design awards to win. If you want to do the most interesting design work of your career, let's talk.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to strategy and features for our B2B and B2C experiences by bringing a lens of deep user empathy built from real qualitative and quantitative research and synthesis

• Craft features with strong attention to detail, polish, and what truly creates value to users to raise the quality bar of the product

• Quickly set up prototypes in AI tools or code to communicate concepts, build alignment, and enhance decision making through feeling real experiences

• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Learning Designers, and stakeholders to define strategy, roadmaps, and feature scope

• Be an inventor in thinking up novel experiences that take learning and outcomes to the next level and can’t be produced through AI templates

• Feel comfortable and creative working in a fast-paced and 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 having a lot of fun thinking about personalizing curriculum for every learner, measuring real-world proficiency, live tutoring sessions, and voice interactions.

What we’re looking for?

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

• You stay close to users. You think about real people learning real languages in real contexts. You actively seek out the humans using the product, not just data about them and are able to synthesize valuable insights about them that inform strategy and direction. You seek ways to put your work in front of people, before you feel it’s perfect just to learn something valuable.

• Product thinking and structured judgment. You frame the problem before solving it and always know why you’re doing something. You can distill what you’re working on into simple narrative framings and key beats without being lost in the details.

• AI-native workflow. You already use AI creatively in your process to unlock speed and quality and are eager to continue learning how to apply it in novel ways.

• Taste and craft while moving fast. You can spot a great idea in a sea of okay ones and understand what’s worth investing in building. You do this while moving quickly and know when to stay scrappy vs invest deeply in final polish.

• 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

• Build with prototypes first to communicate and show your thinking clearly to others

• 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 about agentic workflows you'd be excited to share with our team and ability to tinker directly in code

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.