Associate Creative Director

Posted 2 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
New York, NY, USA
Hybrid
163K-245K Annually
Senior level
Edtech • Machine Learning • Mobile • Other • Software
We’re here to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.
The Role
Develop and lead integrated, culture-focused brand campaigns across social, video, experiential, out-of-home, partnerships, and emerging channels. Translate strategy and cultural insights into creative concepts, direct multidisciplinary collaborators and agencies, present recommendations to senior stakeholders, protect brand identity, and use campaign results to improve future work. The role combines hands-on art direction, creative leadership, production oversight, and mentoring without direct people management.
Summary Generated by Built In

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...

Duolingo’s Brand Campaigns team creates culture-first ideas that earn attention, strengthen our brand, and inspire people to learn. We’re looking for an Associate Creative Director (art) to develop and deliver integrated campaigns that are unmistakably Duolingo. As a senior individual contributor, you’ll combine hands-on concepting with creative direction. You can turn brand strategy, cultural insights, and business goals into compelling work across social, video, experiential, out-of-home, partnerships, and emerging channels. You’ll partner closely with Brand Campaigns, Social, Product Marketing, PR, and global teams to guide ideas from brief through launch while maintaining a highest standard of craft.

🧠  You will...

  • Develop original concepts and creative platforms for integrated brand campaigns, partnerships, product launches, and cultural moments.
  • Translate strategy and cultural insights into clear creative territories, narratives, and channel-specific executions.
  • Lead creative development from brief through launch, including concepting, presentations, production, feedback, and final delivery.
  • Create work directly while guiding designers, writers, animators, filmmakers, agencies, and production partners toward a cohesive vision.
  • Present creative recommendations to partners and senior leaders, explaining how the work supports the audience insight, brand strategy, and campaign goals.
  • Partner with Brand Campaigns, Social, Product Marketing, PR, Growth, regional marketers, and Analytics to build ideas that work across channels and markets.
  • Protect and evolve Duolingo’s voice and visual identity while adapting ideas for different audiences, platforms, and cultural contexts.
  • Use campaign results, audience response, and post-launch learnings to improve future creative work.
  • Mentor creative collaborators through clear direction and actionable feedback without direct people-management responsibility.

✅  You have...

  • A portfolio of integrated consumer-brand work that demonstrates original thinking, strong craft, measurable business impact, and has broken through in-culture.
  • Experience developing campaigns across multiple formats and channels, such as social, film, out-of-home, experiential, partnerships, and digital.
  • A track record of taking creative work from an open-ended brief through production and launch.
  • Strong concepting and storytelling skills, with the ability to make brand and product messages entertaining, clear, and relevant.
  • Experience directing multidisciplinary internal teams, agencies, freelancers, and production partners.
  • Sound creative judgment and the ability to give specific, constructive feedback that improves the work.
  • Clear written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including experience presenting and building alignment with cross-functional partners.
  • An understanding of internet culture, entertainment, and platform behavior—and judgment about when a cultural moment is right for a brand.
  • Comfort balancing creative ambition with audience needs, business goals, timelines, budgets, and production constraints.
  • The ability to move between strategic thinking and hands-on creative development in a collaborative, fast-moving environment.

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

  • Experience creating culturally resonant work that earned organic conversation, press, or community participation.
  • Experience adapting global campaign ideas for local markets without losing the central creative concept.
  • Hands-on expertise in copywriting, art direction, design, or film direction.
  • Experience using emerging creative tools, including generative AI, to explore and develop ideas responsibly.
  • Deep enthusiasm for education, languages.
  • You are a student of culture and know which memes are hot and which memes are stale.

Please include a link to your portfolio showcasing relevant work samples. A portfolio submission is mandatory for consideration of your candidacy.

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!

Salary Range:
$163,200—$244,800 USD

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

  • Portfolio showcasing integrated consumer-brand work with original thinking, strong craft, measurable business impact, and cultural relevance
  • Experience developing campaigns across social, film, out-of-home, experiential, partnerships, and digital channels
  • Track record taking creative work from an open-ended brief through production and launch
  • Strong concepting and storytelling skills
  • Experience making brand and product messages entertaining, clear, and relevant
  • Experience directing multidisciplinary internal teams, agencies, freelancers, and production partners
  • Sound creative judgment and ability to provide specific, constructive feedback
  • Clear written, verbal, and visual communication skills
  • Experience presenting and building alignment with cross-functional partners
  • Understanding of internet culture, entertainment, and platform behavior
  • Ability to balance creative ambition with audience needs, business goals, timelines, budgets, and production constraints
  • Ability to move between strategic thinking and hands-on creative development in a collaborative, fast-moving environment
  • Experience creating culturally resonant work that earned organic conversation, press, or community participation
  • Experience adapting global campaign ideas for local markets
  • Hands-on expertise in copywriting, art direction, design, or film direction
  • Experience using emerging creative tools, including generative AI, responsibly
  • Enthusiasm for education and languages
  • Portfolio submission is mandatory for consideration

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

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The Company
HQ: Pittsburgh, PA
670 Employees
Year Founded: 2011

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)!

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