Senior Backend Engineer- ML Systems

About us

Our mission is to become the de facto way people learn foreign languages. We begin by teaching the next billion people English and Spanish

English is the global language of business, culture, and communication, and over 1.5 billion people around the world are actively trying to learn right now. Others dream of communicating with the half-billion native Spanish speakers across the globe. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to learn to speak a language without constant access to a speaking partner. Grammar and vocab apps don't really help – you need to actually converse with someone.

Speak is on a journey to fix this. We're creating an AI-powered experience that replicates the flow of a conversation, without needing a human on the other end. The goal is to make it radically more accessible to be able to have conversations in a foreign language and eventually help hundreds of millions of people gain fluency who otherwise wouldn't be able to.

We started on this journey over four years ago and we've still got a long ways to go. We're thoughtfully adding new team members only when we think they can truly play a big role in our mission.

Speak is currently live in South Korea where we have quickly grown to become the top grossing education app in the country. We recently launched in Japan as well and are expanding to more markets in the coming months. The company is well funded, raising a recent Series B backed by investors like OpenAI, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, and others. We’re a team of just under 40 based primarily in SF, Seoul, and Ljubljana.

About this role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to work on ML Systems at Speak and help us level-up our production ML backend services. In this role, you will be responsible for improving the robustness of our LLM operations, designing a global queueing and load-balancing system, and supporting new product features that intersect with Product, ML, and Engineering teams. As we scale rapidly across the globe this year, you will play a uniquely critical role in ensuring that the multifaceted backend server empowering our lessons and app with ML scales smoothly to millions of learners!

What you'll be doing

• Generally, owning and building ML-related systems and services and working closely with product to design and implement new features
• Building and integrating a Prompt Management system for creating and versioning different prompts and templates
• Developing a Prompt Experimentation framework for performance monitoring of production conversational and assessment prompts
• Handling queueing and load-balancing systems on our server
• Improving logging, testing, and error handling on the ML server

What we're looking for

• Strong software engineering background, with a focus on backend development
• Experience with production deployment infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.
• Proven experience in building, maintaining, and scaling backend servers, APIs, and data pipelines
• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript, with a strong understanding of software engineering best practices
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, and the ability to work independently or as part of a team

Bonus

• Experience with ML infrastructure
• Experience with LLM Operations

Why work at Speak?

1. Join a fantastic, tight-knit team at the right time:  we're growing super quickly, we just raised our Series A from some of the top investors in the valley, and we've achieved product-market fit. 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 South Korea and Japan, and launching in a number of new markets soon. We have dedicated offices in San Francisco, Ljubljana, and Seoul, 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.