# Assessment Design Lead at Speak

- Company: Speak
- What the company does: Speak is the first & only app that lets you get real conversational practice without needing a live tutor on the other end. And we build some serious AI tech to make that possible. Backed by Accel, Khosla and Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://www.speak.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: US - Remote
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $100K to $140K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-10
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/speak/e247baa3-af8e-4ea4-a2db-d6f7395e1f5c
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/speak-assessment-design-lead/

## About the role

Speak cares deeply about learners actually learning and improving with Speak. We have a dedicated Proficiency team to own how we measure learning efficacy and speaking proficiency, from unit-level mastery checks to standalone proficiency tests to onboarding placement, all in service of understanding users’ proficiency levels and learning gains in an accurate, transparent and actionable manner.

## What they're looking for

- Language Proficiency Domain Expertise: Deep familiarity with frameworks like CEFR (or ACTFL, IELTS/TOEFL band descriptors) and what separates "did you learn what we taught you" from "how good is your speaking overall."
- Fairness Across Learner Populations: Can identify whether an item or rubric unfairly penalizes specific L1 backgrounds or accents (differential item functioning) — essential for a speech-based test serving learners across dozens of native languages
- Translates Qualitative → Technical: Can turn a construct like "pronunciation quality" into something concrete enough for an ML engineer to build a scoring pipeline against, without either oversimplifying or getting lost in academic nuance
- Ownership of Quality Bar: Comfortable being the sign-off authority on content validity — makes the call clearly and follows through on it, rather than deferring to data alone or product pressure to ship
- Comfort with Ambiguity: Comfortable operating in a 0-to-1 environment. Can wear multiple hats, take a fuzzy goal and turn it into a concrete plan, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and keep momentum without waiting for perfect clarity or team setup

Tags: Learning & Curriculum