Senior Customer Success Manager - Korea

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

As a Senior Customer Success Manager in Korea under the Speak for Business (S4B) team, you'll own our most strategic direct B2B customer accounts and set the standard for what great customer success looks like at Speak. This is a high-impact IC role focused on driving retention and expansion across Korea's most valuable customers, while helping shape the playbooks and best practices that will define our CS function. You'll be a player-coach—delivering exceptional results on your own book while showing the team what world-class customer success looks like in action.

This role is designed for someone who wants to make an immediate impact as a top-performing IC, with an explicit path to team leadership as we scale.

What you'll be doing

• Own and grow a portfolio of Korea's highest-value direct business accounts, driving both retention and expansion to contribute meaningfully to our 130%+ NRR target

• Run strategic QBRs and executive business reviews that customers find genuinely valuable, positioning yourself as a trusted advisor

• Drive learner engagement and product adoption within your accounts—your activation rates and weekly active use metrics should demonstrate what's possible

• Proactively identify expansion opportunities (upsells, cross-sells, seat expansion, new use cases) and execute on them, often in partnership with Sales

• Build and document playbooks based on what actually works: expansion plays, onboarding workflows, QBR templates, health check processes

• Share learnings and best practices with the team—not through formal training programs, but by being a go-to resource when CSMs need help with complex accounts or tricky situations

• Identify operational gaps in our CS workflows and build practical fixes, from reporting improvements to expansion tracking to data hygiene

• Support the onboarding of new CSMs by being available as a thought partner and showing them how we operate at our best

What we're looking for

• 5+ years as a top-performing Customer Success Manager or Account Manager in B2B SaaS, with demonstrable results in both retention and expansion

• Native or near-native fluency in Korean and business proficiency in English—daily collaboration with Speak's global team should be seamless

• Proven ability to manage strategic accounts: you know how to run strong QBRs, build account plans, manage executive relationships, and present data-driven insights that drive customer action

• A constructive problem-solver who identifies issues and builds solutions, earning trust by fixing things rather than just flagging them

• Operational instinct: you're comfortable building processes, documenting playbooks, and creating structure where none exists

• Collaborative and team-first mindset: you influence peers through expertise and example, and you help others get better without needing formal authority

• Interest in growing into people management—this role has an explicit path to Team Lead based on performance

Nice to have

• Experience in EdTech or the Korean corporate training landscape

• Familiarity with CRM and customer success platforms (HubSpot, etc.)

• Experience in fast-growth or startup environments

• Background in cross-functional collaboration with Sales, Marketing, and Product teams

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.