Head of Engineering

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 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 Head of Engineering for our San Francisco office to lead and manage our engineering team day-to-day, take our engineering practice to the next level, and grow it with top-tier talent. We’re looking for somebody passionate about and experienced with growing an engineering team from 10 to 50. 

This role will work extremely closely with the founders of Speak as well as the product team, and own engineering roadmap and execution.

What you’ll be doing

• Create a strong engineering culture and practice
• Put great engineering processes and tooling in place (e.g. code reviews, testing, deployment process, development environments, etc.)
• Properly balance velocity and quality
• Lead high-performance engineering planning & execution
• Work closely with the product team to understand product priorities and roadmap
• Make major technical decisions including architecture and system design decisions
• Have the ability to see the forest from the trees - balance pragmatic business needs with technical tradeoffs.
• Recruiting and grow a world-class engineering team:
  1. Effectively recruit top-tier engineering talent
  2. Mentor and manage the engineering team, keeping them all happy, motivated, and challenged

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of experience in high-growth tech startups
• Experience managing and growing a high-performing engineering team with excellent results
• Strong product sense and judgment on balancing velocity and quality
• Ideally, staff-level engineering & architecture experience, especially with our stack (Node, Typescript, React, Postgresql, AWS, GCP, Swift, Kotlin)

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.