What Success Looks Like

In your first 3 months, you'll become the primary engineering owner of Speak's subscription payments infrastructure, understand its most significant reliability risks, and begin addressing critical issues.

Within 6 months, you'll have established meaningful safeguards, monitoring, and engineering practices that proactively detect payment issues and reduce their frequency and impact.

Within 12 months, you'll have transformed payments into a dependable engineering foundation: one that supports international growth, enables faster product development, and operates reliably without constant manual intervention.

What We're Looking For

• Staff-level engineering experience. Typically 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of independently owning complex, business-critical production systems.
• Deep experience with recurring subscriptions. You've personally built, operated, and improved subscription billing systems for a consumer product, including renewals, cancellations, refunds, and failed payments. Experience limited to one-time checkout or payment processing isn't sufficient.
• Consumer mobile payments expertise. You understand subscription billing on the Apple App Store and Google Play, including how purchases, subscription state changes, and entitlements flow through backend systems.
• Experience with subscription payment providers. Hands-on experience with RevenueCat, Paddle, Stripe Billing, or comparable platforms.
• A strong foundation in distributed systems. You're comfortable reasoning about asynchronous events, consistency, retries, idempotency, reconciliation, and failure recovery across multiple systems.
• Strong backend engineering skills. Experience designing and operating reliable backend services and relational databases. Our stack includes Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and GCP, but we're open to engineers with strong fundamentals in other technologies.
• A track record of improving reliability. You've identified consequential production risks, investigated incidents, and implemented durable improvements that measurably reduced failures or customer impact.
• High ownership and autonomy. You're comfortable taking responsibility for an unfamiliar or fragmented system, defining priorities without a predefined roadmap, and driving complex improvements from design through production.
• Cross-functional technical leadership. You communicate clearly with engineering and non-engineering stakeholders, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and create systems and practices that help other engineers succeed.

Nice to Have

• Experience migrating between subscription payment providers or consolidating fragmented payment architectures.
• Experience with international subscriptions, including multiple currencies, taxes, payment methods, and regulatory requirements, particularly in APAC markets.
• Experience building or operating shared subscription entitlement systems across mobile and web.
• Experience scaling payments or subscription infrastructure for a consumer application with millions of users.
• Experience as an early or founding engineer for a business-critical technical domain at a high-growth startup.

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.

Compensation: $220K - $280K