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...
We're looking for a Consumer Product Lead (Merchandise / Online Store Lead) to grow Duolingo's online store in Japan and build it into a meaningful part of how fans experience our brand. This role is a backfill for the previous head of merch and will focus primarily on the Duolingo Store, while also helping shape pop-ups and potential retail store opportunities. You'll lead merchandising and ecommerce for Japan, with a high bar for quality, localization, and brand fit, while helping Duolingo show up in the real world in ways that feel uniquely delightful and culturally resonant.
Japan is one of Duolingo's most important brand and IP markets, and this role has a real opportunity to build something from the ground up, with the potential for successful playbooks, formats, and learnings from Japan to inform how we scale merchandising globally over time.
This role reports to the Director of Country Marketing, Japan & Korea.
🧠 You will...
- Own the P&L and day-to-day operations of Duolingo's online store in Japan, including demand forecasting, inventory planning, assortment planning, site performance, supply chain, and fulfillment, with a high bar for efficiency and quality
- Own the store as a startup within Japan's marketing org, growing it with an eye toward revenue, ROI, and commercial performance across traffic, conversion, AOV, repeat purchase, and sell-through
- Lead product planning, design direction, and production, from concept through launch, in partnership with Brand, Design, Social, and Operations
- Identify, select, and manage external partners (vendors, manufacturers, agencies) and own those stakeholder relationships end-to-end
- Build the Duolingo Store into an efficient, on-brand marketing channel that deepens fan engagement through product drops, storytelling, and localized execution
- Develop and execute pop-up experiences and help explore future retail store opportunities that bring Duolingo to life in Japan
- Build and test merchandising concepts, product drops, and launch formats in Japan first, developing repeatable systems and playbooks so that what works can be adopted by other markets as we scale our consumer products business globally
- Work closely with the broader marketing team to connect store moments with campaigns, community buzz, and brand storytelling
✅ You have...
- 7+ years in e-commerce, merchandising, or consumer products leadership for a consumer-facing brand
- Experience building a merchandising or e-commerce function from 0 to 1, with hands-on ownership of a P&L and platforms such as Shopify
- An ability to think outside the box on merchandising and branding, balancing commercial performance with strong brand fit
- Experience leading cross-functional work across creative, marketing, operations, and external partners, with excellent execution skills in fast-moving environments
- Business-level English and Japanese, with strong communication skills across local and global teams
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Experience launching or operating pop-ups, experiential retail, or store-based brand activations
- Experience scaling a merchandising or ecommerce function internationally, especially with localized assortments or market-specific launches
- Familiarity with fandom-driven, character-led, or lifestyle brands where products help consumers express identity and affinity
- Strong instincts for what makes physical products feel uniquely Duolingo: high quality, distinctive, and culturally resonant
- An entrepreneurial mindset and comfort owning a business end-to-end, with an eye toward turning a Japan success story into a broader, potentially global, merchandising mode
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.
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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.
Skills Required
- 7+ years in e-commerce, merchandising, or consumer products leadership for a consumer-facing brand
- Experience building a merchandising or e-commerce function from 0 to 1 with hands-on P&L ownership
- Familiarity with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify
- Experience leading cross-functional work across creative, marketing, operations, and external partners
- Ability to balance commercial performance with strong brand fit and execution in fast-paced environments
- Business-level English and Japanese with strong communication across local and global teams
- Experience launching or operating pop-ups, experiential retail, or store-based activations
- Experience scaling merchandising or ecommerce internationally with localized assortments
- Familiarity with fandom-driven, character-led, or lifestyle brands
- Entrepreneurial mindset and comfort owning a business end-to-end
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.
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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.
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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.
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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)!
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