Speak

Speak

Product Designer - Consumer

San Francisco

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 8 days ago
Design SystemsResearchCommunication

About the role

  • 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.
  • The result is a complete path from beginner to confident speaker across multiple languages.

Responsibilities

  • Partner with Product, Data, Research, and Engineering to define opportunities, evaluate impact, and raise the quality bar for learner-facing product work
  • If you want to do the most interesting design work of your career, let's talk.

Requirements

  • You have experience designing high-quality consumer products.
  • You can distill what you're working on into simple narrative framings and key beats without being lost in the details.
  • A point of view about agentic workflows you'd be excited to share with our team and ability to tinker directly in code

Benefits

  • Shape strategy and end-to-end product experiences for Speak's consumer learning surfaces, bringing deep empathy for learners across cultures, motivations, and proficiency levels
  • Design across key growth moments - onboarding, activation, habit formation, retention, and subscription experiences - while protecting learner trust and long-term learning outcomes
  • Prototype quickly in AI tools, code, or interactive design tools to make new learning experiences feel real before they are fully built
  • Invent novel interaction patterns for AI-powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates
  • that learning products can be both deeply effective and beautifully crafted.

Company info

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • As a Product Designer focused on consumer experiences, you'll design the core moments that help learners build real-world speaking confidence: finding the right path, practicing with AI, getting feedback, staying motivated, and building a lasting learning habit.
  • Speak is inventing new interaction patterns for language learning - from AI tutoring and voice-first practice to roleplay, proficiency measurement, and personalized curriculum.
  • You'll work across ambiguous, high-impact product areas where interaction design, learning science, AI behavior, and emotional craft all matter.
  • Use qualitative and quantitative signals to understand learner behavior, synthesize insights, and make strong product judgments
  • Thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment where the best answer often has to be discovered through making

This listing is sourced directly from Speak's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.