{"id":91071,"url":"https://alion.io/job/speak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform","title":"Engineering Manager, Infrastructure / Platform","company":{"id":48232,"name":"Speak","domain":"speak.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/speak-com","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":33,"ghost_share":0.273,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":105,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":220000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-10T20:05:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-10","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T18:40:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":189,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":188},"description":"About us\nOur mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language.\nLearning 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.\nSpeak 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.\nAbout This Role\nWe're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Platform & Infrastructure team at Speak! This is an extraordinary moment to join us: we're in the middle of a fundamental agentic shift in software development, and we're embracing the change.\nYour team's mission is to enable every engineering team at Speak to own and operate their own infrastructure, by providing reliable foundations, self-serve tooling, sensible guardrails, and hands-on guidance that let them ship quality features fast while maintaining a state-of-the-art customer experience.\nThat surface area is broad and consequential: velocity, reliability, and performance across our client apps, web, API, and infrastructure; developer productivity; and security! When Speak is fast and stable for millions of learners, and when our engineers can ship without friction, that's your team's work.\nAs an EM at Speak, you'll also be a key driver of our agentic engineering transformation, helping your team evolve from \"using AI to code faster\" to designing the systems, environments, and feedback loops that enable agents to do increasingly autonomous, high-quality work. Platform is where that leverage compounds: the tooling, environments, and guardrails your team builds determine how agentic the rest of the org can be. We believe this shift is creating a massive and widening gap between teams that fully embrace it and those that don't, and we're building for the former.\nWe're looking for EMs who are excited to use coding agents to get close to the metal again, stay deeply in the details of their team's work, and lead by example.\nWhat you'll be doing\nLeading and managing a team of engineers while setting strong output and productivity expectations\n\nContributing technically, both through coaching and leadership as well as directly contributing: e.g. shipping smaller projects, bugfixes, and improving the agent environment using coding agents\n\nDriving your team's agentic engineering transformation: constantly asking what's still being done manually, identifying slowdowns and roadblocks, and actively closing the gap\n\nSetting the pace and driving velocity while articulating and setting a high quality bar\n\nCollaborating closely and effectively with partner functions like Product/Design/many more to execute effectively in the AI era\n\nProactively pushing for changes to shared infrastructure, tooling, and systems that help the broader engineering org become more agentic\n\nBuilding and maintaining a healthy, high-performing team culture\n\nWhat we're looking for\n8+ years of IC software engineering experience on fast-paced, high performance teams\n\n4+ years of direct team management experience\n\nStrong backend, systems, platform/infra, or performance background\n\nDeeply technical and building faster than ever with coding agents\n\nHigh agency but low ego\n\nStrong conviction that 10x engineering output is possible with agentic tools and practices\n\nProven ability to drive velocity, hold a high quality bar, and give direct performance feedback\n\nExcited about working in-person in San Francisco at least 3-4 days per week\n\nNice to haves\nBackground in AI-native products and systems\n\nTrack record of driving org-wide developer productivity or tooling initiatives\n\nWhy work at Speak\nJoin 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.\n\nDo 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.\n\nGlobal 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.\n\nImpact 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.\n\nSpeak 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5953,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Language Learning","Speech & Audio AI","Education AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-04-10T20:05:38Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.553,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":188,"expected_fill_days":105,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/speak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/speak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T22:04:40Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3447,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48232},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48232"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fspeak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fspeak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fspeak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/speak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fspeak-engineering-manager-infrastructure-platform"}]}