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...
Learning is at the heart of Duolingo’s product, and AI is opening new ways to create, personalize, and evaluate learning experiences. We’re looking for a VP of Learning Design to lead our 40+ person Learning Experience (LX) organization day to day and help make every lesson more effective, motivating, and memorable for hundreds of millions of learners.
Reporting to the VP of Learning Experience, you’ll help shape how Duolingo teaches, with your primary focus on building a strong organization and developing its people. You’ll lead through directors and other senior leaders, strengthen the team’s learning design and product capabilities, and ensure LX delivers strong results in partnership with Product, Design, Engineering, and Data across language, math, music, and chess.
This role is based in our New York or Pittsburgh office.
🧠 You will...
- Help millions of people learn more effectively, identifying opportunities to improve how Duolingo teaches and guiding LX leaders to turn those opportunities into better learning experiences.
- Build a high-performing LX organization and leadership team, owning organizational design, hiring, leadership development, performance management, succession planning, and team health.
- Ensure LX delivers on its commitments, allocating resources to the highest-impact work, holding leaders accountable for results, and helping them resolve obstacles.
- Strengthen product capabilities across LX, helping leaders coach their teams to make sound product decisions, write clear specs and roadmaps, present effectively at Product Review, and use AI to ship small experiments independently.
- Represent LX in key cross-functional forums, build strong partnerships, and help its leaders influence product decisions and resolve cross-team challenges.
✅ You have...
- Experience leading a multidisciplinary organization through directors and other senior leaders in a fast-moving, product-led environment.
- A passion for people leadership, with a track record of developing strong leaders, empowering teams to take ownership, and delivering results through others.
- Meaningful grounding in learning design, learning science, or a related discipline, with the judgment to coach experts and connect learning principles to product decisions.
- Experience shaping consumer products through the teams you lead, including using AI to accelerate product development or content generation.
- Excellent executive communication and judgment, with the ability to make difficult tradeoffs, influence senior leaders across functions, and lead through ambiguity and change.
- Ability to work from or relocate to New York, NY or Pittsburgh, PA on a hybrid (4+1) schedule.
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Experience building AI-powered learning experiences or systems for generating and evaluating learning content at scale.
- Experience at a founder-led or rapidly scaling consumer technology company.
- Significant experience using Duolingo, and opinions about how to make it better.
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
- Experience leading a multidisciplinary organization through directors and senior leaders in a fast-moving, product-led environment
- Track record of developing strong leaders, empowering teams, and delivering results through others
- Meaningful grounding in learning design, learning science, or a related discipline
- Experience shaping consumer products through teams led, including use of AI for product development or content generation
- Excellent executive communication and judgment, including influencing senior leaders and leading through ambiguity and change
- Ability to work from or relocate to New York, NY or Pittsburgh, PA
- Experience building AI-powered learning experiences or systems for generating and evaluating learning content at scale
- Experience at a founder-led or rapidly scaling consumer technology company
- Significant experience using Duolingo and opinions about how to improve it
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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