Engineering Manager, Infrastructure / Platform

📋 Job Overview

At Speak, 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. 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.

🏢 About Speak

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.

🎯 The Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Platform & Infrastructure team at Speak! This is an extraordinary moment to join us: we're in the middle of a fundamental agentic shift in software development, and we're embracing the change.

Your team's mission is to enable every engineering team at Speak to own and operate their own infrastructure, by providing reliable foundations, self-serve tooling, sensible guardrails, and hands-on guidance that let them ship quality features fast while maintaining a state-of-the-art customer experience.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Leading and managing a team of engineers while setting strong output and productivity expectations
• Contributing technically, both through coaching and leadership as well as directly contributing: e.g. shipping smaller projects, bugfixes, and improving the agent environment using coding agents
• Driving your team's agentic engineering transformation: constantly asking what's still being done manually, identifying slowdowns and roadblocks, and actively closing the gap
• Setting the pace and driving velocity while articulating and setting a high quality bar
• Collaborating closely and effectively with partner functions like Product/Design/many more to execute effectively in the AI era
• Proactively pushing for changes to shared infrastructure, tooling, and systems that help the broader engineering org become more agentic
• Building and maintaining a healthy, high-performing team culture

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of IC software engineering experience on fast-paced, high performance teams
• 4+ years of direct team management experience
• Strong backend, systems, platform/infra, or performance background
• Deeply technical and building faster than ever with coding agents
• High agency but low ego
• Strong conviction that 10x engineering output is possible with agentic tools and practices
• Proven ability to drive velocity, hold a high quality bar, and give direct performance feedback
• Excited about working in-person in San Francisco at least 3-4 days per week

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Background in AI-native products and systems
• Track record of driving org-wide developer productivity or tooling initiatives

🎁 Benefits

Compensation: $220K – $300K • Offers Equity

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Speak does not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.