Engineering Manager, Infrastructure / Platform

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 This 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.

That surface area is broad and consequential: velocity, reliability, and performance across our client apps, web, API, and infrastructure; developer productivity; and security! When Speak is fast and stable for millions of learners, and when our engineers can ship without friction, that's your team's work.

As an EM at Speak, you'll also be a key driver of our agentic engineering transformation, helping your team evolve from "using AI to code faster" to designing the systems, environments, and feedback loops that enable agents to do increasingly autonomous, high-quality work. Platform is where that leverage compounds: the tooling, environments, and guardrails your team builds determine how agentic the rest of the org can be. We believe this shift is creating a massive and widening gap between teams that fully embrace it and those that don't, and we're building for the former.

We're looking for EMs who are excited to use coding agents to get close to the metal again, stay deeply in the details of their team's work, and lead by example. What you'll be doing

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

What we're looking for

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