Lead Business Analyst

Speak; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Speak is seeking a Lead Business Analyst to be a strategic analytics partner across the company. You will work with product, growth, marketing, finance, and leadership to answer the ambiguous, high‑stakes questions that shape our direction — where to invest, what's really driving the business, and how our consumer and enterprise businesses fit together.

You’ll bring a point of view (not just an answer), and you’ll be a trusted voice in board and business‑review prep.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in analytics, strategy, or business/finance analytics.
• Advanced SQL and modern analytics tools; familiarity with dbt or semantic layers.
• Hands-on AI/LLM tooling for data synthesis, hypothesis generation, and productivity acceleration.
• Strong business and financial acumen — you're comfortable owning LTV, CAC, payback, and NRR, and connecting it to strategy.
• Ability to frame ambiguous questions, form a point of view, and communicate it persuasively to technical and non-technical audiences, including leadership.
• Bias for turning insight into decisions, and ownership to follow through on impact.

Responsibilities

• Frame ambiguous business questions with leaders and bring rigorous, opinionated analysis.
• Bridge Finance and Marketing: connect budget pacing, spend efficiency, and channel outputs to revenue forecasts.
• Own high-leverage questions like unit economics, growth drivers, the B2CB2B picture, and translate into recommended actions for leadership.
• Drive board- and business-review level analysis and synthesize outputs into a clear, trustworthy narrative.
• Define and govern core metrics as a single source of truth and drive organization-wide adoption.
• Collaborate on planning metrics (LTV, CAC, payback, NRR) including segmented analyses.
• Champion self-serve and AI-assisted analytics to enable routine decision-making.

Tools

dbt

Semantic layers

Job description

About us

Our mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language.

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.

About this role

We're looking for a Lead Business Analyst to be a strategic analytics partner to the entire company. You'll work across product, growth, marketing, finance, and leadership to answer the ambiguous, high‑stakes questions that shape our direction — where to invest, what's really driving the business, and how our consumer and enterprise businesses fit together. You'll bring a point of view (not just an answer), you'll be a trusted voice in board and business‑review prep, and you'll make sure the whole company runs on numbers it can trust. This is a high‑leverage role for someone who loves turning data into decisions and wants their fingerprints on the strategy of a fast‑growing company.

What you'll be doing

• Partner with leaders across every function to frame ambiguous business questions and bring rigorous, opinionated analysis to the decisions that matter most.

• Act as the bridge between Finance and Marketing: connecting budget pacing, spend efficiency, and channel‑level outputs to revenue forecasts and broader planning conversations

• Own the high‑leverage company questions like unit economics, growth drivers, the B2CB2B picture, and where to place the next bet — and turn them into recommendations leadership acts on.

• Drive board‑and business‑review‑level analysis, synthesizing what's happening across the business into a clear, trustworthy story.

• Own our core metric definitions as a single source of truth: define them, govern how they change, and drive org‑wide adoption so the company stops debating which number is right.

• Partner with Finance on the metrics behind planning — LTV, CAC, payback, and NRR — including more sophisticated, segmented LTV across our consumer and enterprise businesses.

• Champion self‑serve and modern, AI‑assisted analytics so the organization can answer routine questions on its own.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years in analytics, strategy, or business/finance analytics, with a track record of insight that changed material business decisions.

• Advanced SQL, strong experience with modern analytics tools, and familiarity with dbt or semantic layers

• Hands‑on experience applying AI/LLM tools to analytical tasks such as data synthesis, hypothesis generation, and productivity acceleration

• Strong business and financial acumen — you're comfortable owning the logic behind LTV, CAC, payback, NRR, and revenue recognition, and connecting it to strategy.

• The ability to frame ambiguous questions, form a point of view, and communicate it persuasively to both technical and non‑technical audiences, including leadership.

• A bias for turning insight into decisions, and the ownership to follow through on impact.

Nice to have

• Experience partnering with a Finance team on unit‑economics methodology (LTV/CAC/NRR).

• Both consumer (B2C) and enterprise (B2B) experience.

• Background in consumer subscription, edtech, or language learning.

Why work at Speak

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, Tokyo, and Taipei, 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.