--- title: 'Product Designer - Consumer at Speak' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-consumer-speak-san-francisco-bfhhepdsbj7p' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-13' --- # Product Designer - Consumer at Speak - **Company:** Speak - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $160k–$260k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-07-13 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/speak/2f98e46d-a85c-4ad2-bc6c-f4c783b857b0 ## Job description ## About us 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. ## About the design team 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. If you want to do the most interesting design work of your career, let's talk. ## Role & responsibilities 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. - 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 - Partner with Product, Data, Research, and Engineering to define opportunities, evaluate impact, and raise the quality bar for learner-facing product work - Use qualitative and quantitative signals to understand learner behavior, synthesize insights, and make strong product judgments - Invent novel interaction patterns for AI-powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates - Thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment where the best answer often has to be discovered through making The exact product area you will work on will depend on team needs and your strengths, but likely areas include onboarding, activation, personalized learning, speaking practice, subscriptions, and learner motivation. This role is primarily anchored in our consumer experience, with opportunities to collaborate across adjacent surfaces as Speak grows. ## What we’re looking for - 6+ years of product design experience. You have experience designing high-quality consumer products. - You stay close to users. You think about real people learning real languages in real contexts. You actively seek out the humans using the product, not just data about them and are able to synthesize valuable insights about them that inform strategy and direction. You seek ways to put your work in front of people, before you feel it’s perfect just to learn something valuable. - Product thinking and structured judgment. You frame the problem before solving it and always know why you’re doing something. You can distill what you’re working on into simple narrative framings and key beats without being lost in the details. - AI-native workflow. You already use AI creatively in your process to unlock speed and quality and are eager to continue learning how to apply it in novel ways. - Taste and craft while moving fast. You can spot a great idea in a sea of okay ones and understand what’s worth investing in building. You do this while moving quickly and know when to stay scrappy vs invest deeply in final polish. - Communication and stakeholder collaboration. You can own a room, build trust, and push back when something isn't right. You bring people into your work along the way knowing that multiple perspectives produce the strongest work. We also love to see - Experience in language learning, education, or another domain with deep cross-cultural product surface area - A bias toward prototypes to communicate ideas, test assumptions, and make your thinking tangible - A strong portfolio that demonstrates user-centric thinking, high craft, and innovative interaction patterns - Contributions to design systems that scale beyond a single team - A point of view about agentic workflows you'd be excited to share with our team and ability to tinker directly in code ## Why work at Speak - Join a fantastic, tight-knit team at the right time: we're growing very quickly, we've most recently raised our Series C 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. - 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. - 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, Tokyo, and Taipei, and you’ll have the opportunity to talk to users in each of these regions on a regular basis as well as travel. - 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. ## About Speak ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that focuses on teaching conversational fluency through real-time speaking practice and instant feedback, without needing a human tutor. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series C; $1B valuation as of December 2024) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with offices in Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana) - **Founded**: 2016 - **Founders**: Connor Zwick (CEO) and Andrew Hsu (CTO) ## Core Business - **Industry**: Language learning / EdTech - **Target Customers**: B2C (individual language learners) and B2B (Speak for Business – over 200 enterprise customers) - **Mission/Purpose**: “To reinvent the way people learn, starting with language.” The goal is to make conversational practice radically accessible so that hundreds of millions of people can gain fluency. ## Products & Services - **Speak App**: A subscription-based mobile and web application (iOS, Android, Web) that uses a proprietary “Speak Method” – learn useful phrases, practice them out loud with AI-driven drills, then apply them in simulated real-world conversations. Supports English learning from eight source languages; plans to add Spanish and French. - **Speak for Business**: A B2B tier for companies that want to provide English conversation training to their employees, currently serving 200+ corporate clients. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: $1 billion (December 2024, Series C led by Accel) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $171.3 million across six rounds; annual revenue estimated at $7.0 million (LinkedIn data) - **Notable Investors**: Accel, OpenAI Startup Fund, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Buckley Ventures; individual angels include Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. - **Growth Signals**: - 10M+ app downloads, #1 English learning app in South Korea - Available in over 30 countries - Headcount grew 30.9% YoY to 166 employees (LinkedIn, May 2026) - B2B segment has 200+ customers - Average user engagement of 10–20 minutes per day ## Competitive Advantages - **Conversation-first approach**: Unlike grammar/vocab apps, Speak teaches by making users speak out loud, using proprietary speech recognition and generative AI to provide immediate feedback. - **AI tutor that scales**: Replicates natural conversation without needing a live human, making high-quality practice affordable ($20/month or $99/year). - **Deep OpenAI partnership**: Early access to the latest speech AI from OpenAI (also an investor), giving a technological edge in voice interaction. - **Strong product-market fit in Asia**: Proven adoption in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and expanding to other markets. ## Strategic Focus - Expand target languages (Spanish and French are next) - Scale Speak for Business globally - Develop a standardized, accurate English fluency assessment (an AI-powered test) - Continue to invest in AI research and engineering to improve tutoring effectiveness ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Mission-driven team passionate about language learning and AI; values efficacy over gamification. - **Team & talent**: 166 people from companies like Meta, Google, DoorDash, Block, Dropbox, and Duolingo. Engineering office in Ljubljana, product and design hubs in San Francisco, operations in Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei. - **Flexibility**: Hybrid/office-based across locations; employees encouraged to travel between offices; annual company offsite. - **Perks**: Competitive salary and equity, comprehensive medical/dental/vision, unlimited PTO, parental leave, 401(k), monthly wellness and language learning stipends, pet-friendly office (official company dog). - **Growth**: Rapidly scaling headcount (+30% YoY) with active roles in engineering, product, marketing, sales, and design. ## Sources 1. [speak.com/careers](https://www.speak.com/careers) 2. [speak.com](https://speak.com/) 3. [linkedin.com/company/usespeak](https://www.linkedin.com/company/usespeak) 4. [TechCrunch: OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation](https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/openai-backed-speak-raises-78m-at-1b-valuation-to-help-users-learn-languages-by-talking-out-loud/) 5. [Y Combinator: Speak](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/speak) ## Other roles at Speak - [Product Lead, Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-enterprise-speak-san-francisco-pv45a3bsw3js) — San Francisco, CA - [Content Localization Specialist (Chinese - Traditional / Japanese)](https://feeny.ai/job/content-localization-specialist-chinese-traditional-japanese-speak-south-korea-9c7ckjwm39cd) — South Korea - [Assessment Design Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/assessment-design-lead-speak-united-states-w55yxvzn27x2) — United States - [Full-stack Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-speak-san-francisco-z8ecxdk1xw63) — San Francisco, CA - [B2B Sales Lead - Korea](https://feeny.ai/job/b2b-sales-lead-korea-speak-seoul-k7qx1kfghnya) — Seoul, South Korea - [People Ops Specialist (Contract) - Korea](https://feeny.ai/job/people-ops-specialist-contract-korea-speak-seoul-wrbbd36m9z8c) — Seoul, South Korea - [Content Localization Specialist (Japanese / Korean)](https://feeny.ai/job/content-localization-specialist-japanese-korean-speak-south-korea-kenmfgqkdwrf) — South Korea - [Content Localization Specialist (Korean / Chinese - Simplified)](https://feeny.ai/job/content-localization-specialist-korean-chinese-simplified-speak-south-korea-9qvr499kdcq7) — South Korea - [Lead Business Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-business-analyst-speak-san-francisco-dzkeyxkp1096) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Accountant](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-accountant-speak-san-francisco-h4wye00jhcc6) — San Francisco, CA