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
Our Strategic Finance team serves as a trusted advisor to the company, driving financial planning, forecasting, and cross-functional partnership. The team guides critical decisions through rigorous analysis and collaboration. We're looking for a Strategic Finance Lead who will partner with business leaders across the company to drive growth, surface insight, and shape investment decisions.
This is a high-impact role on a lean team: you'll operate independently, bring structure to ambiguous problems, and influence senior leaders with clear financial narratives. You'll partner closely with senior leadership to strengthen executive-level visibility into financial performance, investment decisions, and growth opportunities.
What you'll be doing
Develop financial models and economic frameworks to enable product vision and strategy; evaluate strategic product investments and enable strategic tradeoff decisions
Own the financial strategy and analysis for new product development
Build unit economics by segment, vertical, and motion to inform pricing, packaging, and where we lean in
Support capital allocation decisions by evaluating returns on product investments, pricing changes, and operational initiatives
Partner with go to market leadership to drive sales motions across all distribution channels, including global tiered consumer and enterprise channels
Provide strategic guidance and insight to drive end‑to‑end long‑range planning, including assumptions, scenarios, pressure‑testing, and executive storytelling
Surface insights to leadership by translating data into recommendations that shape product and company strategy
Synthesize complex analyses into clear narratives and confidently communicate recommendations to leadership and executive stakeholders
Advance financial reporting processes by leaning into AI tools and workflows and enhanced dashboards
What we're looking for
6–9 years in strategic finance, investment banking, consulting, or a comparable analytical role — with prior startup or high-growth tech experience strongly preferred
Advanced financial modeling skills to drive forecasting, scenario analysis, sensitivity tables, and the ability to build clean, auditable models from scratch with incomplete or complex data
Strong AI tool enablement, able to work with frontier models and validate the fidelity of the output
Direct experience supporting full planning cycles including long range planning, annual planning, quarterly re-forecasts, and board / investor-facing materials
Familiarity with outcomes-based modeling and product led growth
Fluency in SaaS and enterprise metrics to enable go to market motions
Strong written communication in order to provide clear narratives to leadership and external stakeholders
High ownership and high integrity, able to run processes end to end with agency and autonomy
Why work at Speak
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.
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.
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.
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.