QA Specialist

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.

We are seeking a detail-oriented and proactive QA Specialist to join our Quality Assurance team on a 6‑month contract basis with the potential to convert to full-time employment. You will design and execute test plans, identify defects, analyze QA metrics, and work directly with the development and product teams to ensure reliable, user-friendly solutions. The ideal candidate excels in hands-on testing, demonstrates attention to detail, understands QA methodologies, and drives continuous improvement in a dynamic environment.

As a QA Specialist at Speak, your responsibilities will include:

• Test Planning and Execution:

  • Analyze requirements and specifications to develop effective test strategies.

  • Design, execute, and maintain test plans and cases for comprehensive coverage.

  • Conduct functional, regression, performance, analytics, and design testing.

  • Document and track defects using a test management system and issue tracker like Linear.

• Act as an owner:

  • Collaborate with developers, product managers, QA teammates, and other stakeholders to resolve issues pre-release.

  • Triage and groom bug reports for your features, and collaborate with Product Ops on issue management

  • Maintain a high-quality bar for mobile releases, including clear go/no-go recommendations and follow-through on critical issues.

• Consistently optimizing:

  • Maintain comprehensive documentation of testing activities, test cases, and reports.

  • Work with QA teammates, Engineers, and Product teams to identify challenges and improve QA workflows.

  • Utilize QA automation tools to streamline testing and reduce manual regressions where appropriate.

  • Maintain and interpret quality metrics (for example, defect trends, escape rates, test coverage) to drive improvements in release quality and speed.

Must have:

• 3+ years of industry experience in mobile QA, with deep manual hands-on testing and debugging of user-facing applications across both iOS and Android

  • Strong ability to test and reason about asynchronous mobile systems, including network requests, streaming updates, background tasks, retries, timeouts, and offline/online transitions

  • Experience validating mobile analytics instrumentation, including funnels, retention events, and experiment exposure/assignment

  • Ability to design and execute robust test plans for experiments and feature flags, ensuring correct bucketing, guardrails, and safe rollout/rollback behavior

  • Experience applying network and device throttling to surface real-world performance and reliability issues

  • Ability to diagnose and debug flaky mobile tests, particularly those caused by concurrency, threading, or reactive pipelines (e.g., race conditions, timing issues)

  • Approaches testing with an end-to-end user journey mindset, surfacing UX friction and ambiguous feedback alongside functional bugs

• Strong understanding of modern product development and release processes, with a track record of influencing quality decisions (go/no-go calls, risk assessment, launch readiness)

• Highly self-sufficient and comfortable operating in ambiguity; communicates clearly in async, cross-functional environments

• Able to work from the SF HQ 3 days per week

Bonus:

• Proven track record of designing and/or operationalizing agentic QA workflows that measurably improve testing leverage, coverage, release quality, reporting, or release decision-making.

• Experience testing ASR or AI/ML-powered mobile functionality

• Hands-on experience designing and implementing AI-driven test automation systems for mobile applications.

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, 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.

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.