Product Designer - Consumer

Speak•San Francisco, CA

4d•$160,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Speak is reinventing language learning with a human-level, AI-powered tutor. The company has achieved product-market fit and is growing rapidly, having raised over $150m in venture investment. The design team is a small, cross-functional group focused on building novel consumer experiences. This role will design core moments that help learners build speaking confidence, working across ambiguous, high-impact product areas that blend interaction design, learning science, AI behavior, and emotional craft. The designer will shape strategy and end-to-end product experiences, focusing on growth moments like onboarding, activation, habit formation, retention, and subscription experiences, while also prototyping quickly and partnering with cross-functional teams to define opportunities and evaluate impact. The role requires a deep understanding of learner behavior and the invention of novel interaction patterns for AI-powered learning in a fast-paced startup environment.

Requirements

6+ years of product design experience.
Experience designing high-quality consumer products.
You stay close to users. You think about real people learning real languages in real contexts. You actively seek out the humans using the product, not just data about them and are able to synthesize valuable insights about them that inform strategy and direction. You seek ways to put your work in front of people, before you feel it’s perfect just to learn something valuable.
Product thinking and structured judgment. You frame the problem before solving it and always know why you’re doing something. You can distill what you’re working on into simple narrative framings and key beats without being lost in the details.
AI-native workflow. You already use AI creatively in your process to unlock speed and quality and are eager to continue learning how to apply it in novel ways.
Taste and craft while moving fast. You can spot a great idea in a sea of okay ones and understand what’s worth investing in building. You do this while moving quickly and know when to stay scrappy vs invest deeply in final polish.
Communication and stakeholder collaboration. You can own a room, build trust, and push back when something isn't right. You bring people into your work along the way knowing that multiple perspectives produce the strongest work.

Nice To Haves

Experience in language learning, education, or another domain with deep cross-cultural product surface area
A bias toward prototypes to communicate ideas, test assumptions, and make your thinking tangible
A strong portfolio that demonstrates user-centric thinking, high craft, and innovative interaction patterns
Contributions to design systems that scale beyond a single team
A point of view about agentic workflows you'd be excited to share with our team and ability to tinker directly in code

Responsibilities

Shape strategy and end-to-end product experiences for Speak’s consumer learning surfaces, bringing deep empathy for learners across cultures, motivations, and proficiency levels
Design across key growth moments — onboarding, activation, habit formation, retention, and subscription experiences — while protecting learner trust and long-term learning outcomes
Prototype quickly in AI tools, code, or interactive design tools to make new learning experiences feel real before they are fully built
Partner with Product, Data, Research, and Engineering to define opportunities, evaluate impact, and raise the quality bar for learner-facing product work
Use qualitative and quantitative signals to understand learner behavior, synthesize insights, and make strong product judgments
Invent novel interaction patterns for AI-powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates
Thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment where the best answer often has to be discovered through making