QA Engineer

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 senior, highly autonomous QA Engineer to join our Quality Assurance team at Speak. You'll own QA coverage for assigned feature team end-to-end: test planning, execution, and release sign-off. Beyond hands-on testing, this is a high-ownership IC role for someone who actively looks for smarter ways to scale coverage through tooling, automation, and AI-powered workflows, not just manual effort.

What you’ll be doing

• Test planning and execution

  • Own QA coverage for 1~2 pods: analyze requirements, write test plans and test cases, execute across iOS, Android, webapp, and backend.

  • Conduct functional, regression, and design testing. Document and track defects in Qase and Linear

  • Participate in pod weeklies and collaborate with PMs and Engineers to clarify requirements and catch issues before they reach QA

• Risk analysis and release readiness

  • Assess risk across features and releases: identify what needs the most coverage, what can be deferred, and what's a blocker

  • Own release candidate sign-off for your pods, with a clear point of view on what's ready to ship and what isn't

  • Surface patterns in defects and coverage gaps to improve how the team plans and prioritizes QA work

• Scale QA intelligently

  • Identify what's automatable vs. what requires human judgment and act on that distinction

  • Document execution-ready test cases with clear steps for any outsourced or automated testing scope

  • Contribute to evaluating and adopting agentic testing tools and AI-powered workflows that reduce manual effort over time

• Drive quality culture

  • Partner with Product, Engineer, and QA on process improvements, coverage gaps, and release readiness

  • Contribute to QA documentation, standards, and best practices across pods

  • Bring a continuous improvement mindset: if something is slow or manual and doesn't need to be, fix it

What are we looking for?

• 5+ years of QA experience in user-facing mobile apps (iOS and Android required)

• Hands-on tester first: you manually test the app, find real bugs, and document them with precision and full context

• Strong risk analysis instincts: you know what to test deeply, what to deprioritize, and how to make the call under time pressure

• High ownership mindset: you define what good coverage looks like and build toward it without being told

• Experience writing structured test plans and test cases from product specs

• Experienced using AI tools in your QA workflow: test case generation, automated execution, or agentic testing frameworks, and actively look for ways to apply them to reduce manual effort

• Comfortable reading and understanding test scripts; you don’t need to write them from scratch but you can use AI tools to write and improve them without relying on Engineering

• Comfortable in a fast-paced environment where priorities shift and release windows are tight

• Able to work from SF HQ at least 3 days/week

Nice to have:

• Experience with AI-powered testing tools and methodology

• Exposure to ASR or audio/speech product testing

• Familiar with mobile test automation frameworks (Espresso, XCUITest, Appium, or Detox) and/or web (Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress)

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, 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.