Applied Machine Learning Manager, Speak
$250-300k
Offers Equity
3+ days a week in office
English language learning app
Be an early applicant
English language learning app
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$250-300k
Offers Equity
3+ days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
To teach the next billion people English and become the de facto way people learn languages.
Role
Who you are
- 8–10+ years overall experience in applied ML, with a track record of shipping ML and LLM systems into production
- 4+ years people management experience, including leading 1:1s, giving feedback, and handling performance
- Strong technical judgment in applied ML (not primarily ML infra/MLOps), including ability to define and run rigorous evaluations
- Excellent metric sense and analytical thinking: can translate ambiguous goals into measurable outcomes and make tradeoffs
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with Product, Engineering, and Design
- Clear written communication: can write crisp strategy docs, decision memos, and goal docs
- Bonus: speech/audio, linguistics, or multimodal experience
What the job involves
- We’re looking for an ML Manager to lead our ML team (currently 4 people across voice ML and broader ML systems) and raise the bar on execution, measurement, and strategy
- This is a hands-on manager role: you’ll be the line manager for the team, partner closely with Andrew to set direction and ambition, and help us consistently ship ML improvements that move product metrics. You’ll also help us expand and pressure test our strategy as new modeling approaches emerge (for example, speech-to-speech), while keeping the team focused on high-impact bets
- Manage and grow the ML team through clear expectations, regular feedback, and strong coaching
- Define quarterly ML goals and success metrics, establish baselines, and build a visible “scoreboard” for progress
- Drive end-to-end execution on key ML initiatives: planning, evaluation, iteration, rollout, and impact measurement
- Build a repeatable model evaluation and experimentation process (quality, performance, reliability), including rollout criteria
- Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to align roadmaps, clarify ownership, and ensure ML work is shippable and predictable
- Identify gaps in our current ML strategy, propose concrete bets, and translate direction into actionable plans
- Help hire thoughtfully as the team grows, without prematurely scaling into a large org
Our take
As the international language of business, there are many incentives for global entrepreneurs to learn English. With over 1.5 billion people actively learning English to improve their job prospects, the customer base for Speak, an AI tutor in the English language, is potentially massive.
Investors believe so too, with tens of millions of dollars raised to fund the company from a range of international firms, including Korean investors and the Silicon Valley-based OpenAI Fund. This surge of capital will help Speak develop its software and open new markets, especially in the US.
Speak is attempting to break into a highly saturated education market, and the success of learning English fluently through its platform is yet to be proven. That being said, it has the potential to become a leading tool specifically in the mobile app sector if it can prove itself as efficient and accessible as the language learning platform Duolingo.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2024
$78m
SERIES C
Jun 2024
$20m
SERIES B
Total funding: $165.9m
Company benefits
- Speak offers all the standard benefits you'd expect at a tech startup, along with stipends for commuting, fitness, and learning!
- In addition, team members are encouraged to travel between offices and we also host an annual company offsite
Company HQ
Potrero Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Connor Zwick
(CEO)Previously Advisor at Chegg Inc, CEO at coco Controller, Flascards+ and Freelance Blogger at Envato.
Salary benchmarks
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