Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Reposted 21 Days Ago
Pittsburgh, PA
Hybrid
178K-240K Annually
Senior level
Edtech • Machine Learning • Mobile • Other • Software
We’re here to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.
The Role
As a Senior Software Engineer at Duolingo, you will collaborate on software projects, maintain backend services, and optimize delivery pipelines while ensuring quality and reliability.
Summary Generated by Built In

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.

Below you can find more information about the teams we're hiring for:

Core Service Infrastructure

The Core Service Infrastructure team builds and maintains the foundational systems that power Duolingo’s learning app at scale. The team defines and implements best practices to ensure that these critical services remain reliable, high-performing, and easy to operate as the company grows. As a software engineer on the team, you’ll play a key role in building the next generation of these services while championing the adoption of next-generation technologies that will power Duolingo’s continued growth.


Observability Team

This team builds infrastructure and tools that give engineers confidence and clarity at Duolingo scale. We create monitoring, alerting, and debugging experiences that help teams ship faster and respond to incidents effectively. In this team, you'll build instrumentation frameworks, deploy telemetry infrastructure, design dashboards, and connect signals to catch issues before they impact learners. We're looking for engineers passionate about developer experience and reliability.


DevX AI Team

The DevX AI team empowers engineers at Duolingo to be more effective by introducing AI-infused tools that simplify workflows and reduce friction and toil. As a Software Engineer II on the team, you’ll contribute to building and improving AI-driven developer tools used across Duolingo’s engineering organization. You’ll work on projects that improve day-to-day developer workflows. You will help build and maintain systems that integrate AI into the software lifecycle, including contributing to production MCP infrastructure that connects to AI coding agents, with a focus on reliability, usability, and measurable impact.


:brain: You will...
  • Collaborate on software projects with product design and backend aspects
  • Develop, release, and maintain backend services and/or infrastructure
  • Lead individual project priorities, milestones, and ensure we're always shipping
  • Experience onboarding AI tools and changing engineering processes
  • Focus on streamlining engineering processes with AI tools

:check: You have...
  • A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field
  • Strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design
  • Experience programming in Java, Python, or Kotlin
  • Solid understanding of one or more database technologies

:star: Exceptional candidates will have...
  • Industry experience building high-traffic APIs using public cloud providers

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:
$177,700$240,400 USD

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.

Sign up for job alerts here.

Top Skills

Database Technologies
Java
Kotlin
Python
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The Company
HQ: Pittsburgh, PA
670 Employees
Year Founded: 2011

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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