Product Design Lead

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 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 someone to come on as Speak's second designer. The ideal candidate will be a strong generalist designer who has extensive experience with both UI and UX design on mobile that can take design ownership of our core conversational product experience going forward.

We have an opportunity to completely transform the way language is taught and learned, and how AI-driven conversational experiences are introduced to mainstream consumers. We will be experimenting with novel interactions across voice, audio, and video, and we need someone who thrives on creating these new paradigms. This role sits at the center of designing these interactions and will have enormous impact on the future of our company.

What you’ll be doing

• Work with teams across product, design, and engineering to prioritize and spec out new features to build
• Work directly with engineering to ensure a feature gets built, balancing your vision, technical feasibility, and user value
• Design new features all the way from concept to finalized pixels
• Design the UX and UI of new features across platforms, developing and implementing a consistent design language
• Take focused ownership of designing our AI tutoring product, rethinking the way our users learn language from the ground up
• Help support miscellaneous design work across the company as needed

What we’re looking for?

• You have deep experience designing for web and mobile
• You have experience working on a small design team and "doing it all"
• You enjoy going deep on both UX and UI work
• You're a clear communicator and enjoy working closely with partners across teams, particularly in engineering
• You've invested in your craft and have experience with prototyping, micro-interactions, utilizing motion, and creating design palettes
• An ideal candidate will additionally have experience designing a consumer/content-forward app, audio and speaking experiences, as well as have a personal interest in language learning

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 A 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.