Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. It’s a big mission, and that’s where you come in!
At Duolingo, you’ll join a team that cares about educating our users, experimenting with big ideas, making fact-based decisions, and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities and daily collaborations with world-class minds — while doing work that’s both meaningful and fun.
Join our life-changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.
Read our blog to learn more.
About the role...
Join us to build Duolingo Ads, Duolingo’s direct ad business. Most learners use our free, ad-supported app, so high-quality ads are core to our mission. We’re hiring an Ad Sales Lead in Chicago to open and lead the Central region. This is a senior individual-contributor role for a seller who can both win business and help shape how we scale: you’ll set regional strategy, build a high-quality pipeline across priority verticals, cultivate senior relationships with brands and agencies, and close high-impact deals that delight learners and drive revenue. You’ll partner closely with sales leadership and the cross-functional ads team to influence pricing, packaging, market prioritization, and the broader go-to-market motion as Duolingo Ads grows. This is a high-ownership, early-stage opportunity to help define the trajectory of ads on Duolingo for hundreds of millions of learners.
🧠 You will...
- Own the Central region’s direct ads strategy and revenue outcomes, including named-account prioritization, pipeline development, forecasting, and quarterly execution.
- Build and grow senior relationships across brands and agencies, opening new logos and expanding strategic accounts into long-term, high-value partnerships.
- Lead complex, high-impact deals end-to-end, from prospecting and positioning through negotiation, close, renewal, and expansion.
- Translate Duolingo’s unique strengths, including premium attention, native formats, character IP, and brand equity, into clear commercial narratives tailored to advertiser objectives.
- Partner closely with Account Management, Ad Ops, Product, Design, and Engineering to move deals forward, shape feasible programs, and improve the advertiser and learner experience.
- Share actionable market feedback with sales and product leadership to inform pricing, packaging, measurement, and future ad formats.
- Help establish repeatable systems and standards for a growing ads business, including account planning, CRM hygiene, proposal quality, and pipeline rigor.
✅ You have...
- 8+ years of experience in direct digital ad sales, with a strong track record of building senior client relationships and closing meaningful new business.
- Success selling premium video and native/custom ad formats in digital, mobile, or consumer app environments.
- Proven ability to operate as a senior seller in an early-stage or evolving business, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution.
- Strong commercial judgment across pricing, packaging, negotiation, and account prioritization.
- Ability to influence senior decision makers at brands and agencies while working effectively with cross-functional partners internally.
- Strong understanding of ad tech and mobile app ecosystems, and comfort using data to assess campaign performance, shape proposals, and inform sales strategy.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills, with a clear, persuasive style and comfort operating in ambiguity.
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Established relationships with senior brand and agency leaders across the Central region.
- Experience building a direct ads business from 0→1 or scaling a newer ads product within a publisher or platform environment.
- Experience shaping go-to-market strategy, sales process, or regional coverage models beyond your own book of business.
- Familiarity with managed-service and programmatic sales motions, including how they complement one another in a scaled ads business.
The offered salary is dependent upon several factors, including work experience, skills, and internal peer comparisons. The posted range is subject to change in the future. For this role, base salary is supplemented by equity compensation. We encourage you to talk with your recruiter for more information related to compensation for this role!
Benefits: Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here.
Job Alerts: Sign up for job alerts here.
Accommodations: We will do everything we can within reason to make sure that your interview takes place in an environment that fairly and accurately assesses your skills. If you need assistance or accommodation, please contact [email protected].
Equal Employment Opportunity: Duolingo is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do 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.
Fraud Warning: Unfortunately, there is a rise in scammers pretending to be real Duolingo employees. Duolingo and our employees will never ask for your Social Security number, bank details, or passport info, and we’ll never ask you to deposit a check, purchase equipment, or exchange money during the interview process. Real Duolingo employees always use an email that ends in @duolingo.com or @recruiting.duolingo.com. Stay alert and double-check these details before sharing any information.
By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.
Skills Required
- 8+ years of experience in direct digital ad sales with a track record of building senior client relationships and closing new business
- Success selling premium video and native/custom ad formats in digital, mobile, or consumer app environments
- Proven ability to operate as a senior seller in an early-stage or evolving business, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution
- Strong commercial judgment across pricing, packaging, negotiation, and account prioritization
- Ability to influence senior decision makers at brands and agencies and work effectively with cross-functional partners
- Strong understanding of ad tech and mobile app ecosystems and comfort using data to assess campaign performance and inform sales strategy
- Excellent communication and presentation skills with a clear, persuasive style
- Established relationships with senior brand and agency leaders across the Central region
- Experience building a direct ads business from 0->1 or scaling a newer ads product within a publisher or platform
- Experience shaping go-to-market strategy, sales process, or regional coverage models beyond own book of business
- Familiarity with managed-service and programmatic sales motions
Duolingo Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Duolingo and has not been reviewed or approved by Duolingo.
-
Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive for core engineering and product roles, with required jurisdictions showing posted ranges and immigration filings implying a strong base-salary floor. Public compensation snapshots indicate senior packages can scale higher, supporting a clear, market-aligned structure.
-
Healthcare Strength — Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage is paired with mental-health resources and fertility support as core offerings. Coverage for dependents and strong wellness benefits are consistently highlighted.
-
Leave & Time Off Breadth — About 20 days of PTO plus a two‑week company winter break and paid holidays provide substantial time away. A formal sabbatical at 10 years further expands long‑term recharge options.
Duolingo Insights
What We Do
Duolingo is a language-learning education platform that offers 98 total courses across nearly 40 distinct languages. Duolingo is the world’s most popular way to learn a language. Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. Some of our products include: 1. Duolingo: The free, fun, and effective way to learn a language! 2. DET (Duolingo English Test): A modern language proficiency tool designed for today's international students and institutions. It offers an English proficiency score, video interview, and writing sample in an accessible, efficient, and secure testing experience. 3. Duolingo Math: An app that can make math be fun. For everyone. Students can focus on elementary math, which covers classroom topics, or adults can focus on brain training, which strengthens mental math skills and covers more advanced topics. 4. Duolingo ABC: An educational learning app that offers immersive lessons to teach preschool to second grade kids reading fundamentals. Founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo is the most downloaded education app in the history of the App Store and in 2019 became the top-grossing education app worldwide. The app has been awarded Apple's iPhone App of the Year and Android's Best of the Best. Learning a new language used to be expensive; we believe it should be free. Over 1.2 billion people are learning a second language and most of them are learning English to improve their lives. Learning a new language is hard; we believe it can be fun. We use bite-sized lessons that feel like playing a game to keep our learners motivated. With over 500 million learners we have unprecedented data insights on how people learn. Our teams of language learning scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI experts use this data to constantly improve our effectiveness. We’re building a future in which the highest-quality education is accessible to all. Duolingo has been named: 2022 Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators 2022 Fast Company 10 Most Innovative Education Company 2021 Forbes Best Startup Employers 2020, 2018, 2017, 2013 Most Innovative Company by Fast Company 2020 Best Machine Learning Startups for by Glassdoor 2018 Inc. Best Places to Work 2018 Entrepreneur Top Company Culture List University Program Awards: 2022 Handshake Early Talent Award 2022 Untapped Top Internship Programs 2022 OneReq Internship Program Trailblazer Award
Why Work With Us
Our global team works together to make language learning fun, free, and effective for anyone who wants to learn, wherever they are. Best of all, you get to work alongside Duo (literally)!
Gallery
