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San Francisco, California, United States
Onsite
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.
We’re a small and mighty team of five that sit at the intersection of craft, research, invention and product thinking. We build consumer experiences used by millions, alongside B2B products that help organizations bring Speak to their teams. 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 how people learn with AI and we partner closely with Engineering, Learning Design, Product, and Analytics to do it. We stay close to our users and to how our experiences actually feel by prototyping with AI, testing conversation design and voice interaction, and getting comfortable with ambiguity.
Our team takes craft seriously and has 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: that learning products can be both deeply effective and beautifully crafted. If you want to do the most interesting design work of your career, let's talk.
You’ll lead design for a major part of Speak’s consumer experience, either growth (activation, engagement, discovery) or core learning (AI tutoring, speaking practice, feedback, progression). We’ll pick the focus together based on your strengths.
We don’t use seniority titles internally, but elsewhere this would be a Principal Product Designer: a hands-on IC who sets direction for a product area, drives our most consequential work, and helps other designers do their best work.
Set the experience vision for your area, grounded in empathy for learners across cultures and levels
Spot opportunities at the intersection of learner needs, product insights, and new AI capabilities, and make them tangible through prototypes that shape strategy with Product and Engineering
Invent interaction patterns for AI-powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates
Prototype and iterate quickly in AI tools, code, or interactive tools
Lead across team boundaries so the holistic experience feels cohesive
Use qualitative and quantitative signals to decide what to explore, ship, and improve
Consumer design leadership. Likely 10+ years, including shaping a major consumer product area hands-on through shipping and iteration. Scope, craft, and impact matter more than years.
Close to users. You seek out real people, not just data, and test early with prototypes.
Product judgment. You frame the problem first and turn ambiguity into a clear vision others can build toward.
AI-native workflow. You use AI throughout your own workflow and build systems to unlock speed and quality in your creative and strategic work.
Taste and craft at speed. You have a point of view on great experiences and set the bar for the team. You also know when to stay scrappy vs when to spend time in polish.
Influence and mentorship. You build trust across teams, help groups reach decisions, and make other designers better.
Experience in language learning, education, or cross-cultural products
Contributions to design systems that scale beyond one team
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.
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.
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, Tokyo, and Taipei, and you’ll have the opportunity to talk to users in each of these regions on a regular basis as well as travel.
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.
