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 finding innovative solutions to complex technical problems, running countless experiments (300+ at a time!) with our massive user base to make data-driven decisions, and educating our users and employees alike. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities, mentorship and collaboration with world-class minds, and a variety of projects with large scopes — while doing work that’s both fun and meaningful.
Join our life-changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.
About the roleAs a Senior Engineering Manager at Duolingo, you will own mission-critical projects from end to end, contribute to product strategy, and lead a team of world-class engineers at our company HQ in Pittsburgh.
Listen to why Basim Baig, one of our Senior Engineering Managers, loves Pittsburgh!
Below you can find more information about the team we're hiring for:
You will lead and develop a team in the Retention Area, a collection of teams within the Growth Pillar at Duolingo.
Retention Area teams are dedicated to making the app more engaging, rewarding, and fun. They build and evolve classic features like the Streak or our infamous notifications, and newer in‑app events (Friends Quest, Daily Quests) that keep learners motivated and coming back. As part of one of the most experiment‑driven groups at Duolingo, these teams play a key role in driving daily active users through playful, habit‑forming experiences.
Engineering Managers at Duolingo wear two hats: team lead and role manager.
As a team lead, you will...
- Form a dynamic duo with your product counterpart to co-lead a cross-functional team. Teams at Duolingo operate with a high degree of autonomy and collaboration. What this means: product, design, and engineering in the same room, coming up with solutions together, instead of product specs landing on engineers’ desks fully formed. If a team needs other roles to do their best work (data scientists, user researchers), we embed them on the team.
- Provide both technical and product perspectives on new product ideas to ensure we find the fastest way to test a hypothesis. Rather than MVPs, we launch focused V1s. We keep them lean and double down on what works.
- Own the planning, execution, and success of projects that directly improve our top-line business metrics like daily active users, and identify which metrics to optimize for at the team level.
- Set clear expectations around engineering quality and promote practices that enhance code quality, scalability, and maintainability. Make sure tech specs are written and of high quality.
- Identify best practices, tools, and services that allow us to ship faster and keep our habit-building features as reliable as they can be, while also increasing the team’s velocity and cutting the right corners when it makes sense.
As a role manager, you will...
- Develop your team, deeply understanding each engineer’s strengths and career goals, and proactively providing mentorship and stretch opportunities to help them grow their impact.
- Set clear expectations and hold a high bar for performance, regularly providing candid feedback, addressing challenges decisively, and maintaining a supportive environment where engineers feel valued, engaged, and empowered.
- Provide clarity and alignment, transparently communicating the “why” behind decisions, thoughtfully guiding your team through changes, and ensuring everyone understands their role in achieving team and company goals.
- Invest in your own leadership growth by participating in Duolingo’s Role Manager Program, peer coaching circles, the Growth Engineering Leads assembly, and ongoing development opportunities to continuously elevate your impact as a leader.
We post a multi-level salary range for all of our roles.
This is not inclusive of the rest of our awesome portfolio that includes equity compensation and world-class benefits. Our salary ranges are the same for all US locations. Your recruiter can share more details about the range for a specific level during the hiring process. The actual salary within the range is determined by many factors including but not limited to, skills, experience, education, and internal equity.
Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here.
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].
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.
By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.
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Top Skills
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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