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 Lead Recruiter to own product hiring at Duolingo — partnering directly with our Chief Product Officer to build and shape the Product org from the ground up. This isn't just executing on a req list. You'll help define what great looks like, influence how we think about product talent, and build the processes and relationships that make hiring a competitive advantage. If you love blending strategy with hands-on execution, operating at the intersection of recruiting and business, and leaving your fingerprints on a world-class team, this is the role for you.
🧠 You will...
- Own full-cycle recruiting for Product roles at all levels — ICs to senior leaders — building deep pipelines and consistently closing top talent.
- Be a true partner to the CPO, shaping hiring strategy, prioritizing roles, and helping define what great Product talent looks like at Duolingo.
- Lead and influence without direct authority, working across recruiting, sourcing, and business stakeholders to align processes, calibrate expectations, and drive outcomes.
- Drive sourcing strategy (roughly 25–30% of your time), going beyond inbound to build proactive outreach for senior and hard-to-fill roles.
- Use data to tell the story — diagnosing pipeline health, surfacing insights to leadership, and making decisions that balance speed with quality.
- Champion the candidate experience from first touch to offer close, making sure every interaction reflects Duolingo's brand and values.
- Build the infrastructure — whether that's interview frameworks, leveling guidance, or hiring playbooks — that scales beyond you.
✅ You have...
- Ability to work onsite in Pittsburgh, PA, Monday–Thursday, with Friday optional
- 7+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, with meaningful depth in Product hiring
- Experience partnering closely with senior leaders (VP/C-suite) to shape org strategy, not just fill seats
- A track record of hiring across levels — from PMs to Directors to VPs — with strong judgment on what "great" looks like at each
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, with the ownership mindset to create structure where it doesn't exist
- Strong data fluency — you know how to use pipeline metrics to drive conversations and influence decisions
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Experience leading or mentoring a recruiting team, even informally
- Deep market knowledge of the Product talent landscape, including how to position Duolingo competitively
- A history of building repeatable hiring systems that improve quality and efficiency at scale
- And, of course… an impressive Duolingo streak.
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.
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.
Sign up for job alerts here.
Skills Required
- 7+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience
- Experience partnering with senior leaders (VP/C-suite)
- Experience hiring across levels from PMs to VPs
- Strong data fluency for using pipeline metrics
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
