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 hiring a Head of Talent Management Programs & PMO to architect, run, and continuously improve Duolingo’s most critical talent systems. Reporting to the Head of Talent Management & Rewards, you will translate people strategy into intuitive, scalable programs and a disciplined operating cadence—spanning performance and promotion frameworks, talent reviews and succession, manager enablement, and the portfolio governance that keeps everything on time and high‑quality. You’ll build the “through line” across Talent Management and Rewards, with clear metrics and crisp execution that match Duolingo’s clock speed.
🧠 You will...
Talent Program Architecture & Strategy- End-to-End Program Design: Lead the evolution of core talent cycles, including performance management, 360-degree feedback, and promotion frameworks, ensuring they align with a high-performance culture.
- Competency & Career Mapping: Architect standardized competency models and career ladders that provide clear, transparent growth trajectories for all global functions.
- Succession & Talent Readiness: Design and facilitate the talent review process, identifying high-potential leaders and building a data-backed succession pipeline to future-proof the organization.
- Manager Enablement: Partner with cross-functional partners to ensure talent programs provide managers with the tools and insights needed to lead high-performing teams.
- Strategic Roadmap Management: Own the TMR integrated roadmap, maintaining centralized visibility into project health, dependencies, and resource allocation to ensure on-time delivery.
- Operational Excellence: Establish and iterate on a "lean" project management methodology that prioritizes speed and impact over administrative overhead.
- Cross-Functional Orchestration: Act as the primary connector between Total Rewards, Talent Acquisition, and Business Leadership to ensure talent initiatives are integrated and cohesive.
- The Talent Dashboard: Develop an enterprise performance framework using key metrics (e.g., promotion velocity, retention, talent density) to measure the ROI of our people programs.
- First-Principles Analysis: Leverage data to conduct root-cause analysis on organizational trends, providing executive leadership with actionable insights to inform policy and resource decisions.
✅ You have...
- 8+ years in Talent Management, People Operations and portfolio/program management, including senior‑level ownership of company‑wide talent programs in fast‑paced, product‑led or high‑growth environments.
- Comfort and curiosity with AI tools as applied to talent program design, analytics, and portfolio management, with a clear sense of where automation accelerates the work and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.
- A proven track record building or leading a PMO, with clear outcomes shipping complex, multi‑stakeholder programs on time.
- Depth in modern talent practices: performance systems, org design, competency/career frameworks, succession planning, and manager effectiveness.
- Expert operational rigor with program/project management frameworks and process improvement (e.g., PMP/PgMP/Agile, Lean principles) applied pragmatically.
- Strong data fluency and a product mindset for people analytics—able to design dashboards that tell a story, inform trade‑offs, and drive accountability.
- Excellent executive communication and influence; you simplify complexity, align stakeholders, and make crisp, well‑reasoned recommendations.
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Talent Subject Matter Expertise: Deep understanding of modern talent management theories, including performance psychology, organizational design, and succession modeling.
- Operational Rigor: Expert-level proficiency in project management frameworks (PMP, PgMP, or Agile) and process improvement methodologies (Lean Six Sigma).
- Strategic Influence: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to simplify complex operational challenges for executive stakeholders.
- Data Fluency: A "product mindset" regarding HR data capable of building dashboards that tell a story and drive accountability.
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
- 8+ years in Talent Management, People Operations and portfolio/program management with senior ownership of company-wide talent programs
- Proven track record building or leading a PMO and delivering complex multi-stakeholder programs on time
- Depth in modern talent practices: performance systems, org design, competency/career frameworks, succession planning, and manager effectiveness
- Expert operational rigor with program/project management frameworks and process improvement (e.g., PMP/PgMP/Agile, Lean principles)
- Comfort and curiosity with AI tools applied to talent program design, analytics, and portfolio management
- Strong data fluency and a product mindset for people analytics; ability to design dashboards that inform trade-offs and drive accountability
- Excellent executive communication, stakeholder alignment, and influence
- Deep understanding of talent management theory (performance psychology, organizational design, succession modeling)
- Expert-level proficiency in project management frameworks (PMP, PgMP, or Agile) and process improvement methodologies (Lean Six Sigma)
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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