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

We're looking for a Senior Accountant to become the operational core of the Finance team in San Francisco. You'll own the day-to-day accounting while continuously improving how we work. This is a hands-on role with an unusually broad scope: we're a small team, so you'll have real impact — from systems redesign to technical accounting questions. You'll start by mastering the transactional core; from there, the role grows as fast as you do.

We’re especially excited about candidates who are AI-native and fluent in frontier tech environments. You proactively explore new tools, can quickly learn unfamiliar systems, and enjoy tightening integrations and automations to make workflows faster, cleaner, and more scalable.

This role is a great fit if you'd rather build tomorrow's workflow than run yesterday's. You see every process as a draft to keep improving, and you're excited for your job to look different every six months as Speak grows.

What You'll Be Doing

• Run key parts of our 5-business-day close in Campfire (revenue recognition, recons, variance analysis, tool-to-ERP integrations)

• Build and improve workflows with an AI-native mindset (automations, tighter integrations, better controls)

• Own P2P and T&E end to end. You’re responsible for vendor management, transaction review, policy enforcement, and the judgment calls that don't fit the happy path. You set the quality bar and stay close to the details without doing every keystroke yourself.

• Manage global contractor and creator payments

• Maintain transaction integrity across the finance stack

• Support the external audit with clear schedules and process documentation

• Drive the execution of cost-of-revenue and internal AI initiatives — track the impact of cost optimizations and product launches, and enable AI tooling with the right guardrails and controls

• Partner with internal and external stakeholders on projects with real business impact — from supporting market expansion to systems implementations and close acceleration

What We're Looking For

Minimum requirements

• 3–5 years in accounting or audit — whether at a high-growth startup or coming from Big 4 (or similar) and ready to go in-house

• Fluency with modern finance tools. You don't need experience with our exact stack; you need to be someone who learns a new system in a week

• Able to own the full-cycle P2P process

• Solid understanding of US GAAP

• Able to manage multiple workflows simultaneously without things falling through the cracks

• Experience preparing reconciliation schedules and flux analyses

• Ability to quickly understand workflows end-to-end and grasp how systems integrate with each other

Nice to haves

• Experience working in a globally distributed team and multi-entity environment

• Experience with global creator payment management

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting or Finance; CPA or actively pursuing CPA preferred

• Experience supporting or conducting external (Big 4) audits

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.