Senior Accountant

Senior Accountant

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Operations

Compensation

• $109K – $135K • Offers Equity

At Speak, our compensation philosophy is based on work experience, interview performance, leveling and other factors evaluated during the hiring process.

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 serve as 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 room to grow as Speak scales.

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.

You're someone who stays on top of multiple workstreams without things slipping, surfaces issues before they become problems, and genuinely enjoys figuring out how to make processes more robust.

What You'll Be Doing

• Own P2P in Ramp (vendor onboarding support, invoice processing, coding, policy enforcement)

• Run day-to-day T&E (cards, reimbursements, employee support)

• Own contractor payments in Deel end-to-end (routing, approvals, onboarding/offboarding coordination)

• Manage global creator payouts (onboarding, invoices, payment cycles)

• Own key parts of the 5-business-day close in Campfire (recons, variance investigation, clean tool-to-ERP sync)

• Maintain transaction integrity across the finance stack and fix integration breaks

• Support audit requests with clear schedules, support, and process documentation

• Improve workflows with an AI-native mindset (automation, tighter integrations, better controls)

• Support ad hoc finance ops projects as needed

What We're Looking For

Minimum requirements

• 3–5 years of accounting experience, preferably at a high-growth tech startup

• Experience with full-cycle P2P management and P2P/T&E tools (Ramp, Tipalti or similar)

• Strong working knowledge of ERPs: AP module, journal entries, fixed assets, and reconciliations

• Experience with payroll software, recording payroll journal entries and reconciling payroll-related accounts

• Solid understanding of US GAAP

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

• Sharp eye for discrepancies in AP, payroll, or expense data

• 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 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, 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.