Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. It’s a big mission, and even though we've made a lot of headway, we still have work to do — and that’s where you come in!
Duolingo’s designers care about creating high-quality experiences that look and feel fun. From animators to writers, product designers to researchers, Design brings purpose, feeling, and delight to every interaction with our brand, inside the app and out. As a designer, you’ll join a culture of creativity and craft, where we have a high bar for excellence and an endless curiosity about how to bring more unexpected quirk and fun to the pursuit of learning.
Join us in our mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.
About the role
You’ll elevate the way we use art and animation to make our products more engaging, immersive, and interactive.
This role reports to the Director of Design Infrastructure and partners closely with our Product, Design, Animation, and Engineering teams. At Duolingo, we take pride in our craft and agonize over high-quality design with a user-friendly (and fun) experience for everyone.
You will...
- Build interactive animations for our Math & Music courses using Rive, in ways that are repeatable & scalable
- Drive tooling improvements that more closely couple our design & animation tools, like Rive & Figma, with our engineering workflows.
- Work with technical animators, producers & engineers to drive efficiency across pipelines that help teams go from ideas to an interactive in-app experience. Things like: pitching and building automated solutions to digital asset management, as well as advising on the organizational structure, naming conventions, and technical/performance expectations for animation states.
- Stay on top of feature developments for our most critical tools, like Rive & Figma, and propose projects that can upgrade how we use these tools. Build plugins and write scripts that can make our tools work better for us.
- Test, learn, and promote new tools and technologies to further animation and interactivity in our products. Serve as a point of contact across the business for how we’re leveraging & improving our tooling stack.
- Partner closely with Design Ops, who will use your systems and tools to operationalize creative workflows that unlock high-quality execution. Drive the technical documentation for creative best practices to help teams adopt new tools & technologies.
You have...
- Experience delivering delightful visuals while adhering to performance constraints, reducing technical complexity while still hitting MVP requirements
- Experience writing plugins, scripts, and tools
- Experience with interactive animation for mobile content
- A minimum of 5 years experience in a role similar to creative technology (technical or procedural animation, scripting gameplay, state machines, etc.)
- Experience succinctly communicating trade-offs, ideas, and recommendations to managers, engineers, and artists
- A portfolio that demonstrates your prototyping savvy
- A demo reel that is no more than 2 minutes long, including a breakdown calling out your work in the reel
- The ability to relocate to New York City or Pittsburgh, PA
Exceptional candidates will have...
- Proficiency in Python, C++, or similar scripting languages
- Experience working at a small game studio, VFX house, or tech start-up
- Experience with Rive
- General 3D Skills like modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating
- An understanding of game design principles and player experience.
- Experience with Maya, Houdini, Toonboom Harmony, or similar tools
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 your recruiter.
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.
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.
Salary Range:
$174,250—$294,000 USD
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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