Surface Pattern Design Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

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're a small, high-craft team that sits at the intersection of research, invention, and product thinking. We build consumer and B2B experiences used by millions across 150+ markets - and a lot of the work is genuinely novel: inventing how someone talks to an AI tutor, what feedback feels like when you're learning out loud, and how progress should be measured and celebrated.

We stay close to learners through prototyping, interviews, betas, and experiments. We take craft seriously, iterate fast, and value a high-trust critique-and-build culture. We have something to prove - and we care about doing work that is both useful and genuinely excellent.

We're hiring a seasoned Designer to improve how design and engineering work together, starting with a world-class, agent-first design system.

By agent-first, we mean the system is structured so humans and AI agents can make the same good decisions: choosing the right components, applying the right patterns, using consistent names, and reviewing UI against shared rules.

This is a systems thinker, high-craft, high-collaboration role. You'll work closely with dedicated engineers who will be your collaborators in bringing this to life across our product surfaces. You'll own the design quality, semantics, and product usefulness of the system; engineering will own the technical architecture and implementation, with close collaboration on component APIs, constraints, and adoption.

Scope

• You'll work across iOS, Android, and web.

• We're mobile-first in the near term, with an expectation that components and patterns translate cleanly to web as those surfaces expand.

• This role focuses on product surfaces (not the marketing site).

• Design Engineering workflow improvements. Treat the seams between functions as a design problem: shared language, fewer re-made decisions, clearer handoffs, and faster shipping.

• Component craft and system coherence. Set the quality bar for components and patterns, and pressure-test them by building and feeling the real thing (ideally prototyping with agents), not only speccing.

• The semantic layer that scales. Component naming, usage rules, and decision guidance so the right choice is the easy choice for any designer, engineer, or agent.

• Adoption across the design org. Create the standards and workflows that make using the design system the default, not something teams and agents have to seek out.

• Documentation + QA workflows. Own usage documentation and quality check workflows that make quality as hands-off and reliable as possible, including AI-assisted checks for consistency, accessibility, and component usage.

In your first months, you'll likely:

• Build and evolve the components we actually need - prioritizing the highest-leverage gaps, pressure-testing them in real product work, and turning repeated decisions into durable patterns.

• Establish agent-first systems and workflows - rules + semantics that help humans and agents use the system correctly without depending on tribal knowledge. Set them up to show up in the right moments to create efficiency and consistency across teams.

• Set the operating cadence with design and engineering - a contribution/review rhythm that keeps the system coherent and adopted.

• 6+ years in product design, with real depth in design systems built on tokens, component APIs, and a single source of truth in code (not only a Figma library).

• You’ve helped build a design system before. You've contributed meaningfully to components/patterns/tokens, governance, adoption, and the messy realities of getting it used.

• A systems thinker. You'd rather build the thing ten people use than ship one feature yourself.

• Taste you can defend. You can pinpoint what's off (spacing, motion, interaction states) and explain what's right for Speak and why.

• Clear communication + cross-functional drive. You can write the rule, not just draw the component, and work across teams to drive adoption.

• Autonomy and end-to-end ownership. You thrive with little scaffolding and drive from problem -> roadmap -> shipped -> adopted.

• Fluency with AI in your craft. You've built repeatable ways of working with AI/agents and can explain what changed and why.

• Accessibility and scale mindset. You think about how the system holds up as it grows across mobile and web.

• Comfort building or changing components in code (Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin/Jetpack Compose, or web).

• Shipped consumer-scale mobile products across many markets/locales.

• Built a design system engineers actually used - and that outlasted your time on the team.

• A point of view on where design-to-code and agent workflows are heading, and what's still broken.

• Experience in language learning, education, or another domain where cross-cultural nuance shapes the product.

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.

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.