Make language learning joyful, sustainable and scalable
Language revitalization preserves culture and saves lives
It all started with a study our founder read that showed suicide rates in Indigenous communities decrease dramatically when people are connected to their language. This sparked a question: what would happen if we removed as many barriers as possible to creating language content?
Language Foundry is the answer. We provide communities with the tools to revitalize, teach and preserve their languages and dialects - on their own terms, under their invitation. Community members lead the development of each course and retain full ownership over it, which means every recording, every lesson and every course stays with the people it belongs to. No outside control over content - just a platform that gets out of the way and lets communities lead.
Our courses are intuitive, culturally grounded and genuinely fun to use. They are designed to reflect the unique cultural identity of each community, using a mix of audio, visual, and text-to-speech tools that let each course be fully customized. The result: self-directed, community-led language revitalization.
With a language going silent every 14 days, and more than 6,000 languages at risk of extinction around the world, we're in a race against time. So our goal is simple and ambitious: make language learning joyful, sustainable, and scalable, while honouring each community's protocols, priorities, and pace. Language is culture. It’s identity. It’s belonging. And with the right tools - and the communities who are already using them - it will endure.
11,000+ learners
40+ school boards
300+ educators
14 languages and dialects
… and growing, across Canada and the US.
Our Team
Chad Quinn
Founder & Chief Executive
Belinda Bien
Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
Belinda Bien
Vice President, Sales & Co-Founder
Mike Parkhill
Dave Russell
Vice President, Software Development
Nomi Nagashima
Community Care Lead
Raegan Boucher
Language Project Manager
Scott Parkhill
Software Developer
Harrison Porteous
Software Developer
Mariana Cabani
Product Manager
Our Partners
Remarkable Communications is a full-service digital storytelling agency that collaborates with Indigenous leaders, communities, and their allies to weave today’s digital technologies with ancestral Indigenous knowledge systems. Since 2019, Remarkable Communications has rolled out thousands of culturally safe communications projects across Canada, including co-raising over $120,000 for land return initiatives. Described by clients as “setting the standard for Indigenous-centred communications” and “the first communications company that is trauma-informed, has a decolonial lens, and actually listens to understand,” Remarkable Communications supports community-led initiatives and the preservation of language and culture through co-created storytelling across social media, websites, short-form video, print, and more.
Interested in joining our team? Check out our current job openings here!
Current Openings
Full Stack Developer
Remote · Canada Only
We build tools that are used by communities, learners and educators to revitalize at-risk and endangered languages. We're a small, distributed group that values sustainably delivering great products in a trusting work environment.
We’re looking for junior and intermediate full-stack software developers to join our Product team.
What you’ll do
To build our web application, we work primarily with C# and JavaScript (using Blazor, Unity, and Phaser frameworks), and Python for our linguistics engine (finite-state transducers - more on that below). You'll work across all of it. Here’s what your day to day will look like:
Build and ship features that communities, language learners and educators directly use.
Communicate your impact every week (even if it’s “nothing”! Some weeks that’s gonna happen).
Collaborate with the team to build and communicate a shared understanding of the most important challenges to solve for our customers.
One of our more interesting codebases handles verb conjugation for Indigenous languages using finite-state transducers (FSTs), a linguistic formalism that is genuinely hard and very important. You don't need to know FSTs on day one. However, you do need to be comfortable sitting with unfamiliar complexity and breaking it down.
What we’re looking for
A few things matter to us more than credentials:
You care about the mission and have empathy for communities looking to revitalize their languages as well as educators and learners, when making decisions.
You show your work as soon as possible, and get feedback from the people you’re trying to impact.
You question your assumptions before defending your solutions.
You can build across the stack: front end, back end, APIs, and enough cloud to deploy your own work.
You share half-formed thinking early rather than waiting until everything is polished.
We don’t care if you know C# or Blazor - we do care about how well and quickly you can learn it.
How we work
The team is fully distributed, and we work asynchronously (aside from occasional meetings). We lean on written plans, decisions, and feedback because it gives people time to think rather than react. We don't track hours. We measure individual and team performance by impact on users, and we talk about it every week.
We avoid bureaucracy and support the person closest to the problem to make great decisions.
Compensation
The salary for this role ranges from $100,000 - $120,000, depending on level.
Benefits
4 weeks vacation per year, plus a holiday office closure in December (this does not come out of your vacation stipend). We’re pretty flexible with vacation.
$3,000 annual Health Spending Account (HSA) at 80% coverage. Unused amounts carry over for one year.
A strong asynchronous culture (other than meetings, work when you work best!)
How to apply
Send an email to developer-job@languagefoundry.com with:
A link to your your GitHub profile
Confirmation that you can legally work in Canada
Your favourite food