Senior Engineering Manager, Language Learning

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...

As an engineering manager and team lead of the Short Form Experience Team, you'll manage a team of 7 engineers to build features that make up the core of the learning experience on Duolingo.

Our short-form lessons are where learners spend the majority of their time on the app, and this team's mission is to make these sessions more effective and engaging. Your team will work on adding new exercises that support our learners in practicing skills like recall and production in bite-sized formats, as well as creating other ways to help learners build foundational skills in a new language.

We're looking for managers who are passionate about improving how we teach while leading engineers in a highly cross-functional team!

🧠 You will...

• Co-lead a cross-functional team with partners in product management, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for features that help us teach better.
• Drive execution of projects from spec to implementation, experimentation/analysis, and ongoing ownership, while ensuring infrastructure reliability, scalability, and observability.
• Use data and rapid experimentation to inform decisions; partner with internal stakeholders to design A/B tests and translate insights into product improvements that measurably impact learning KPIs.
• Attract, grow, and retain diverse engineering talent; provide clear expectations, coaching, and career development, and build a healthy, inclusive team culture.
• Set engineering quality standards and processes that balance speed and long-term maintainability; proactively manage tech debt, product quality, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, research, and other engineering teams to deliver user experiences that serve user needs while being impactful towards business metrics.
• Define team OKRs, ruthlessly prioritize, and remove roadblocks to enable teams to do their best work.

✅ You have...

• Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent.
• A track record of shipping multi-engineer, multi-week+ projects with measurable business impact, balancing speed and quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort in highly experimental, data‑driven environments; experience defining metrics and running A/B tests with analytics or data science partners.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product, design, and data; clear written specs and status updates.
• Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade‑offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices.
• The ability to work from or relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.

⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience leading cross-functional product-focused teams in consumer products.
• Experience setting team OKRs and operating cadences that consistently deliver outsized impact on company‑level metrics.
• Background dealing with ambiguity and managing broad-scoped projects.

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!

Salary Range:

$204,000—$306,000 USD

Benefits: Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here.

Job Alerts: Sign up for job alerts here.

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.