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.
About the role
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to become Speak's first dedicated owner of subscription payments. Millions of learners rely on Speak to improve their language skills, and our subscription systems power how they purchase, renew, and maintain access to the product. Getting payments right is critical to both the learner experience and our business. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- Staff-level engineering experience. Typically 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of independently owning complex, business-critical production systems
- Consumer mobile payments expertise. You understand subscription billing on the Apple App Store and Google Play, including how purchases, subscription state changes, and entitlements flow through backend systems
- Experience with subscription payment providers. Hands-on experience with RevenueCat, Paddle, Stripe Billing, or comparable platforms
- A strong foundation in distributed systems. You're comfortable reasoning about asynchronous events, consistency, retries, idempotency, reconciliation, and failure recovery across multiple systems
- Strong backend engineering skills. Experience designing and operating reliable backend services and relational databases. Our stack includes Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and GCP, but we're open to engineers with strong fundamentals in other technologies
- A track record of improving reliability. You've identified consequential production risks, investigated incidents, and implemented durable improvements that measurably reduced failures or customer impact
More about this role
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.
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to become Speak's first dedicated owner of subscription payments.
Millions of learners rely on Speak to improve their language skills, and our...
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