21GRAMS- Associate Creative Director, Art
•Realchemistry· 1d
🎨 Design⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal💰 $160k-190k🇺🇸 Boston, USA
1d ago
Speak·5 days ago
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.
Speak is looking for a senior creative leader to build and own our global performance creative function. You'll be the connective tissue between our markets’ creative teams — setting the standards, systems, and learning loops that let every market consistently produce content that performs, while keeping local teams fast and autonomous.
This is an IC role to start with immediate dotted line reporting, with a path to building a central team around you as the function grows. You'll work across paid, organic, influencer/UGC, and landing pages, and carry brand stewardship across markets in the absence of a dedicated brand team.
For the right candidate, there's potential for this role to evolve into broader brand and creative design leadership over time.
If you're energized by building things from scratch, thrive at the intersection of creative and data, and have a track record of making content that actually drives growth — this is the role.
Build and lead Speak's global creative operating system — shared standards, briefs, workflows, taxonomies, and learning loops — co-developed with market teams, not handed down to them
Partner with Market Leads and local design teams to raise the performance bar across all 5 current markets and future markets, acting as a thought partner and coach rather than a gatekeeper - your success is measured by how much market creative capability grows, not by central output alone
Own the test-and-learn infrastructure that connects paid, organic, influencer, and landing pages — surface what's working and make sure those learnings flow across channels and markets
Build and scale a creator and UGC engine that feeds both organic and paid acquisition
Own global agency relationships and in-house studio capabilities as the function matures, building hybrid production models that keep output high and costs efficient
Introduce and coach teams on AI creative tools and workflows — building capability across the function, not just speed
Carry brand integrity across performance creative — translating brand principles into great creative output across markets and high-volume testing environments
Contribute to concept ideation and measure how creative performs in market
Must Haves
8+ years in performance and growth creative, ideally in global B2C consumer businesses — traditional background not required; social-native, creator, or agency paths all considered
Deep fluency in mobile and social-first ad formats — Meta, TikTok, and YouTube in depth
Proven track record collaborating with creators to produce winning direct-response ads at scale — you've built hit DR creative with creators, not just managed the relationship
Equal parts creative and analytical — you distill content into its building blocks and use data to design testing frameworks that find winning ads
First principles thinker — you bring an evolving POV shaped by test-and-learn, not the traditional playbook; what you believed about great creative two years ago has changed
Experience designing scalable creative systems — repeatable briefs, production pipelines, testing frameworks, learnings repositories
Cross-channel fluency across UA, ASO, SEO, and CRM — you understand how creative performs across each surface
Ability to influence and coach without being prescriptive — you supercharge local teams without slowing them down or killing their autonomy
Hands-on with AI creative tools (Veo3, Sora, Kling or similar) integrated into repeatable production workflows — valued for operational scale, not just ideation
Nice to Haves
Experience leading hybrid brand design and performance creative teams
Experience managing in-house studio teams alongside agency relationships
Brand identity evolution experience in a competitive consumer or category-defining product
Passion for language learning
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.
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.
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.
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.