Principal Product Designer - Consumer

Candidate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Speak in San Francisco is seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead design for a major portion of our consumer experience, focusing on growth or core learning. You’ll be a hands-on IC who sets direction, ships meaningful work, and mentors teammates.

Partner with Product, Engineering, Learning Design, and Analytics to prototype AI-powered interactions, craft novel user experiences, and ensure a cohesive end-to-end journey across languages and markets.

Qualifications

• Consumer design leadership with 10+ years, shipping and iterating a major consumer product area.
• Close to users, testing early with prototypes.
• Product judgment: define problems and vision.
• AI-native workflow: use AI in your workflow.
• Taste and craft at speed with a strong design point of view.
• Influence and mentorship across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead design for a major part of Speak's consumer experience (growth or core learning).
• Set experience vision grounded in learner empathy.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to shape strategy and direction.
• Invent interaction patterns for AI-powered learning beyond templates.
• Prototype and iterate quickly in AI tools or interactive prototypes.
• Lead across team boundaries to ensure a cohesive end-to-end experience.

Skills

Consumer design leadership

Close to users

Product judgment

AI-native workflow

Taste and craft at speed

Influence and mentorship

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 the design team

We’re a small and mighty team of five that sit at the intersection of craft, research, invention and product thinking. We build consumer experiences used by millions, alongside B2B products that help organizations bring Speak to their teams. The design work is genuinely novel: inventing how someone talks to an AI tutor, what feedback feels like when you’re learning out loud, how a roleplay session should land emotionally, and how you measure a true proficiency score.

Our work shapes the future of how people learn with AI and we partner closely with Engineering, Learning Design, Product, and Analytics to do it. We stay close to our users and to how our experiences actually feel by prototyping with AI, testing conversation design and voice interaction, and getting comfortable with ambiguity.

Our team takes craft seriously and has a lot of fun doing it. We developed our design principles in a multi-week offsite and iterate on them on a living board in our office. We take language classes together to ground our work in first principles. We stay close to our learners through team trips to Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei, as well as lighter‑touch interviews, surveys, betas, and AB tests. We believe in a critique and build culture with high trust, and also get a bit competitive over ping pong. We have something to prove: that learning products can be both deeply effective and beautifully crafted. If you want to do the most interesting design work of your career, let’s talk.

The role

You’ll lead design for a major part of Speak’s consumer experience, either growth (activation, engagement, discovery) or core learning (AI tutoring, speaking practice, feedback, progression). We’ll pick the focus together based on your strengths.

We don’t use seniority titles internally, but elsewhere this would be a Principal Product Designer: a hands‑on IC who sets direction for a product area, drives our most consequential work, and helps other designers do their best work.

• Set the experience vision for your area, grounded in empathy for learners across cultures and levels

• Spot opportunities at the intersection of learner needs, product insights, and new AI capabilities, and make them tangible through prototypes that shape strategy with Product and Engineering

• Invent interaction patterns for AI‑powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates

• Prototype and iterate quickly in AI tools, code, or interactive tools

• Lead across team boundaries so the holistic experience feels cohesive

• Use qualitative and quantitative signals to decide what to explore, ship, and improve

What we’re looking for

• Consumer design leadership. Likely 10+ years, including shaping a major consumer product area hands‑on through shipping and iteration. Scope, craft, and impact matter more than years.

• Close to users. You seek out real people, not just data, and test early with prototypes.

• Product judgment. You frame the problem first and turn ambiguity into a clear vision others can build toward.

• AI‑native workflow. You use AI throughout your own workflow and build systems to unlock speed and quality in your creative and strategic work.

• Taste and craft at speed. You have a point of view on great experiences and set the bar for the team. You also know when to stay scrappy vs when to spend time in polish.

• Influence and mentorship. You build trust across teams, help groups reach decisions, and make other designers better.

Bonus

• Experience in language learning, education, or cross‑cultural products

• Contributions to design systems that scale beyond one team

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.