Infra Lead

Our mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language. We begin by teaching the next billion people English, Spanish, and French.

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 five 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 launched first in South Korea where we have quickly grown to become the top grossing education app in the country. We have now delivered this winning product to more than 40 countries globally and are continuing to expand to more markets in the coming months. The company is well funded, and as of December 2024, we've reached a $1B valuation with our Series C round, through key partners like Accel, OpenAI, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, and more. We’re a team of more than 90 based throughout San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana.

About this role

As an SRE Engineer, Lead 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 userbase.

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

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, 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.