Platform Engineer

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 this role

As a Platform Engineer at Speak, you’ll be the driving force behind the reliability and resilience of the systems that power our global language learning experience. You’ll lead efforts to scale our infrastructure, harden our platform, and ensure that our services are fast, available, and reliable for millions of users around the world.

You’ll work across our stack—from Kubernetes on GCP to our Node.js APIs, Postgres, and Redis —building robust infrastructure and operational tooling. You’ll own incident response, observability, and SLOs while embedding a culture of reliability throughout the engineering org.

Speak is growing rapidly, and we’re pushing our systems harder every day. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of our platform as we scale to the next 10x of users.

What you’ll be doing

• Own the reliability of Speak’s infrastructure across GCP, Kubernetes, and our Node.js/Postgres stack

• Lead response for P0/P1 incidents, drive postmortems, and ensure we’re learning from every outage

• Improve observability, alerting, and on-call processes so we catch issues before users do

• Define and drive adoption of SLOs/SLAs for core systems and services

• Build tools and frameworks to make reliability easier for product engineers—think safer deploys and infrastructure automation

• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and ML teams to ensure reliability is baked into everything we build

• Set short term and long term roadmaps to ensure stability for our growing user base.

• Be a thought leader and coach around platform and infrastructure engineering principles—blameless culture, operational maturity, and continuous improvement

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Platform, and/or infrastructure-focused engineering roles, ideally with experience leading or mentoring others

• Strong experience with GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, and observability tooling like Prometheus and Sentry

• Proven track record of improving reliability, scaling systems, and reducing incident frequency and severity with high traffic systems

• Strong incident management and root cause analysis skills—you know how to lead under pressure

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment safety tooling

• Strong systems thinking, with the ability to identify failure points and proactively harden services

• Deep sense of ownership and a desire to make infrastructure a force multiplier for the rest of the org

Bonus

• Familiarity with cost optimization strategies in cloud-native environments

• Background in security, chaos engineering, or disaster recovery planning

• Contributions to internal tooling, automation, or developer productivity initiatives

1. 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.

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 over 40 countries and launching in a number of new markets soon. We have dedicated offices in San Francisco, Ljubljana, Seoul, and Tokyo, 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.

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.