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 role...
Duolingo's Monetization pillar builds the systems that fund our mission: from subscription packaging and advertising to ML-powered personalization and beyond. As a Senior Engineering Manager on Ads, you'll lead a cross-functional product engineering team responsible for growing and scaling Duolingo's ads business: bringing high-quality ads that delight learners, fit seamlessly into our product experience, and meaningfully contribute to Duolingo’s bottom line. Your team will own the systems behind ad serving, mediation and demand, in-product ad formats and surfaces, and more. You'll partner closely with product, design, data science, machine learning, and ad operations to define strategy and deliver results. Just as importantly, you'll create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers — coaching, developing talent, and fostering a high-performing team culture.
🧠 You will...
- Co-lead a cross-functional pod with Product and Design to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for Duolingo's ads business, balancing revenue growth with learner experience.
- Build and evolve the engineering systems that power ads at scale: ad serving and decisioning, mediation and bidding integrations, in-product ad formats and surfaces, and quality controls.
- Partner with design and product to ship ad experiences that feel native to Duolingo: delightful, well-paced, and respectful of the learner without compromising monetization performance.
- Collaborate with data science and ML partners to design experiments, apply personalization and targeting, and translate insights into product improvements and bookings growth.
- Own planning and execution for projects that directly impact revenue; identify the right team-level metrics to optimize and protect delivery through clear milestones and risk management.
- Bring both technical and product perspectives to new ideas, enabling rapid hypothesis testing without sacrificing reliability, observability, or long-term maintainability.
- Set and uphold engineering quality standards and practices that improve reliability, scalability, and operability across Ads systems.
✅ You have...
- Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers.
- Direct experience working on engineering teams that build and operate ads businesses, whether shipping ads in a consumer app or leading an ads engineering team.
- A track record of owning multi-engineer, multi-week technical projects to successful outcomes in a highly experimental, data-driven environment.
- Strong product instincts and excellent written/verbal communication, with experience aligning diverse stakeholders across engineering, product, design, and analytics.
- Experience working closely with data, experimentation, or machine learning teams to inform prioritization and ship measurable impact (direct ML expertise not required).
- Demonstrated ability to raise the bar on engineering practices for reliability, scalability, and observability.
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Deep experience with ad mediation, waterfall, and bidding systems (AdMob, GAM, Open Bidding, or equivalent), including onboarding and optimizing demand partners.
- A strong track record of designing or shipping in-product ad formats and surfaces in mobile apps, with attention to UX quality and format performance.
- Experience improving ad quality and monetization through experimentation, targeting, or programmatic levers, in partnership with business teams.
- Familiarity with COPPA-compliant or kid-friendly ad solutions and the trade-offs of untargeted inventory.
- Background collaborating with sales/biz ops on direct or programmatic campaigns and translating market feedback into product improvements.
- Experience leading teams that span multiple platforms (iOS, Android, backend) and partnering on ML-powered personalization within consumer apps.
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!
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.
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Skills Required
- Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers
- Track record of owning multi-engineer, multi-week technical projects
- Strong product instincts and excellent communication
- Experience working closely with data, experimentation, or machine learning teams
- Ability to raise engineering practices for reliability and scalability
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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