Machine Learning Researcher

About us

Our mission is to teach the next billion people English and become the de facto way people learn languages.

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. 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 English 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

This is a very special opportunity for the right researcher to work on enormously impactful problems with clear solutions powered by real-world deep learning. As one of the first hires into the ML team, you will have a great latitude in shaping the direction of the ML roadmap and the product decisions.

What you’ll be doing

• Develop new models to solve problems across the dialogue space (speech understanding and synthesis, natural language understanding and generation) and improve accuracy of the models to meet launch requirements
• Perform research to make machine learning more applicable to learning a language.
• Work as peers with our product team by integrating new research into applied projects. Determine scope of the problem, the best place to apply machine learning, set up labelling tasks if necessary, and evaluate different approaches.
• Report and present experimental results and research findings clearly and efficiently.
• Build a portfolio of applied research projects that power the core Speak experience.
• Stay up-to-date on the quickly evolving field of NLP and speech while also focusing on building production systems.
• Support productizing and deploying solutions.

What we’re looking for

• You're excited to work in the context of a small startup and get your hands dirty wherever needed.
• Have a portfolio of projects in research areas including dialogue systems, language understanding, language generation, speech recognition, and speech synthesis.
• A track record of demonstrating autonomy coupled with results.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and common NLP frameworks such as HuggingFace.
• Have a thorough understanding of training and debugging deep neural networks systems.
• Strong collaboration skills - our environment is small and collaborative, and we'd like you to thrive on working closely with others.

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.