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 Senior Director of Performance Marketing to lead the team that drives Duolingo’s paid user acquisition across 100+ markets and our language, chess, and math products. You’ll own the strategy, the budget, and the people, and you’ll be accountable for proving what our spend actually buys.
🧠 You will...
- Lead and grow a team of performance marketers, including managers, and set a high bar for craft, rigor, and ownership
- Own the global paid acquisition budget and portfolio across Google, Apple Search Ads, Meta, TikTok, AppLovin, DSPs, and China platforms, deciding where to scale, hold, or pull back as efficiency changes
- Set the measurement standard for the team: incrementality testing, saturation modeling, and LTV and ROI frameworks that Finance trusts
- Translate channel performance into annual and in year investment plans, and defend them with executive leadership
- Build creative production that scales, combining agency, UGC, creator, and in house work with testing infrastructure that finds winners fast
- Manage agency and ad tech partners, holding them accountable to goals, pacing, and quality
- Flex spend with the organic calendar, including product launches, seasonal swings, and viral moments, in partnership with Social, Brand, and Country Marketing
- Partner closely with Marketing Analytics, Finance, Product, Engineering, and Creative
✅ You have...
- 12+ years in performance marketing or paid UA, including 5+ years leading teams with managers reporting to you
- A track record of owning a large, multichannel mobile acquisition budget at a top subscription or high engagement consumer app
- Deep experience building and defending incrementality tests, saturation analysis, and LTV/ROAS models, not just reporting on them
- The judgment and integrity to recommend cutting spend when returns don’t support it
- Fluency with mobile attribution (MMPs, SKAN, privacy constrained measurement)
- Experience partnering with Product and Engineering on measurement and attribution infrastructure, onboarding and landing experiences for paid users, and tests that connect acquisition to retention.
- Clear, fast written communication, from channel tactics to executive and board level ROI discussions
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Experience running UA in China or other walled garden ecosystems
- Experience scaling creator or UGC programs alongside performance creative
- Experience managing acquisition across multiple products or apps
- A passion for Duolingo’s mission
Please include a link to your portfolio showcasing relevant work samples. A portfolio submission is mandatory for consideration of your candidacy.
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.
By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.
Skills Required
- 12+ years of experience in performance marketing or paid user acquisition
- 5+ years leading teams with managers reporting directly
- Experience owning a large, multichannel mobile acquisition budget at a top subscription or high-engagement consumer app
- Experience building and defending incrementality tests, saturation analysis, and LTV/ROAS models
- Fluency with mobile attribution, including MMPs, SKAN, and privacy-constrained measurement
- Experience partnering with Product and Engineering on measurement and attribution infrastructure, paid-user onboarding and landing experiences, and acquisition-to-retention testing
- Clear and fast written communication for channel tactics and executive or board-level ROI discussions
- Portfolio link showcasing relevant work samples
- Experience running user acquisition in China or other walled-garden ecosystems
- Experience scaling creator or UGC programs alongside performance creative
- Experience managing acquisition across multiple products or apps
- Passion for Duolingo’s mission
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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