AI Product Engineer

About us

Our mission is to become the de facto way people learn foreign languages. We begin by teaching the next billion people English and Spanish.

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. Others dream of communicating with the half-billion native Spanish speakers across the globe. 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 a foreign language and eventually help hundreds of millions of people gain fluency who otherwise wouldn't be able to.

We started on this journey over five 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 launched first in South Korea where we have quickly grown to become the top grossing education app in the country. We have now delivered this winning product to more than 30 countries globally and are continuing to expand 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 60 based primarily in SF, Seoul, Tokyo, and Ljubljana.

About this role

As an AI Product Engineer at Speak, you’ll be at the forefront of building the future of language learning and the best path to language fluency. You’ll be responsible for building novel product experiences powered by LLMs and shipping them into production to millions of users.

Your work will cover the full stack and more: from evaluating models and testing prompts to developing different aspects of Speak like our conversational onboarding experience, AI roleplays and answer explanations, and dynamic lessons tailored to individual users’ strengths and weaknesses.

We’re pushing the boundaries of LLM capabilities to deliver an amazing and unmatched language learning experience teaching users in over 30 countries globally today.

What you'll be doing

• Build and ship LLM-powered language learning products across the full stack, and improve the quality and performance of existing AI-powered features across Speak
• Collaborate cross-functionally with other Engineering teams, Applied ML, Product, Design, and Content.
• Improve how we build LLM apps, including best practices around prompting, experimentation, LLM Ops, measuring quality & performance, and other tooling.
• Help evaluate and productize various types of LLMs for our product use cases, including fine-tuning as needed

What we're looking for

• 5+ years experience in fullstack, product-focused software engineering: our product engineering stack is React/Node/Typescript
  • Bonus: proficiency in Python
• Experience building and shipping LLM apps into production, and evaluating & improving performance over time after deployment
  • You should already have a well-developed sense through experience of what works and doesn’t work when building LLM apps
• Experience with LLM Ops & tooling (e.g. vector databases, RAG, prompt ops)
• Obsession with LLMs & the future of AI-powered language learning
  • You’ve probably done several LLM hackathons, built several side projects, tried out many types of models, and use ChatGPT daily
  • You’re on top of the latest news, tooling, and techniques: advanced prompting & chaining, function calling, embeddings, evals, etc.
• Strong product sense: ability to think broadly/cross-functionally about novel LLM-powered capabilities and product experiences

Office

• San Francisco (Hybrid: 2-3 days / week)

Why work at Speak

1. Join a fantastic, tight-knit team at the right time: we're growing very quickly, we've raised our Series B and an additional extension 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.