Platform Engineer

About usOur 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 roleAs a Platform Engineer at Speak, you’ll be the driving force behind the reliability and resilience of the systems that power our global language learning experience. You’ll lead efforts to scale our infrastructure, harden our platform, and ensure that our services are fast, available, and reliable for millions of users around the world.You’ll work across our stack—from Kubernetes on GCP to our Node.js APIs, Postgres, and Redis —building robust infrastructure and operational tooling. You’ll own incident response, observability, and SLOs while embedding a culture of reliability throughout the engineering org.Speak is growing rapidly, and we’re pushing our systems harder every day. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of our platform as we scale to the next 10x of users.What you’ll be doingOwn the reliability of Speak’s infrastructure across GCP, Kubernetes, and our Node.js/Postgres stackLead response for P0/P1 incidents, drive postmortems, and ensure we’re learning from every outageImprove observability, alerting, and on-call processes so we catch issues before users doDefine and drive adoption of SLOs/SLAs for core systems and servicesBuild tools and frameworks to make reliability easier for product engineers—think safer deploys and infrastructure automationCollaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and ML teams to ensure reliability is baked into everything we buildSet short term and long term roadmaps to ensure stability for our growing user base.Be a thought leader and coach around platform and infrastructure engineering principles—blameless culture, operational maturity, and continuous improvementWhat we’re looking for7+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Platform, and/or infrastructure-focused engineering roles, ideally with experience leading or mentoring othersStrong experience with GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, and observability tooling like Prometheus and SentryProven track record of improving reliability, scaling systems, and reducing incident frequency and severity with high traffic systemsStrong incident management and root cause analysis skills—you know how to lead under pressureExperience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment safety toolingStrong systems thinking, with the ability to identify failure points and proactively harden servicesDeep sense of ownership and a desire to make infrastructure a force multiplier for the rest of the orgBonusFamiliarity with cost optimization strategies in cloud-native environmentsBackground in security, chaos engineering, or disaster recovery planningContributions to internal tooling, automation, or developer productivity initiativesWhy work at SpeakJoin 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 ... (truncated, view full listing at source)