About This Role

We're looking for experienced Engineering Managers to lead critical engineering teams at Speak - the world's leading AI-powered language learning app. This is an extraordinary moment to join us: we're in the middle of a fundamental agentic shift in software development, and are embracing the change.

You'll lead engineers working on some of the most compelling problems in consumer AI, from building realtime voice AI systems to designing LLM orchestration platforms that power millions of personalized learning conversations to scaling inference infrastructure across global markets. The technical surface area is deep, spanning custom ML models, voice agent platforms, LLM tooling, and production infrastructure.

As 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. 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.

As part of this, we're looking for EMs that are excited to use coding agents to get close to the metal again, stay deeply in the details of your team's work, and lead by example.

What you'll be doing

• Leading and managing a team of engineers while setting strong output and productivity expectations
• Contributing 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
• Driving your team's agentic engineering transformation: constantly asking what's still being done manually, identifying slowdowns and roadblocks, and actively closing the gap
• Setting the pace and driving velocity while articulating and setting a high quality bar
• Collaborating closely and effectively with partner functions like Product/Design/many more to execute effectively in the AI era
• Proactively pushing for changes to shared infrastructure, tooling, and systems that help the broader engineering org become more agentic
• Building and maintaining a healthy, high-performing team culture

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of IC software engineering experience on fast-paced, high performance teams
• 4+ years of direct team management experience
• Strong backend, systems, platform/infra, or performance background
• Deeply technical and building faster than ever with coding agents
• High agency but low ego
• Strong conviction that 10x engineering output is possible with agentic tools and practices
• Proven ability to drive velocity, hold a high quality bar, and give direct performance feedback
• Excited about working in-person in San Francisco at least 3-4 days per week

Nice to haves

• Background in AI-native products and systems
• Track record of driving org-wide developer productivity or tooling initiatives