About the role...Duolingo's Monetization pillar builds the systems that fund our mission - from subscription packaging and advertising to ML-powered personalization, performance marketing, and beyond. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll lead a cross-functional product engineering team working on high-impact, revenue-generating systems that help Duolingo grow sustainably while keeping the product playful, transparent, and learner-first. Your team will build and scale systems across ads and paid growth - building signal and audience pipelines, powering creative experimentation, improving ad quality, optimizing budget allocation, and strengthening attribution and ROI guardrails. You'll partner closely with product, design, data science, machine learning, and marketing 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 Marketing to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for Duolingo's performance marketing engine, aligned to ROI guardrails and retained-user growth goals.
- Build and evolve the engineering systems that power paid growth at scale: creative experiment frameworks, audience/signal ingestion and privacy-safe list management, budget and bid optimization tooling, and reliable attribution and reporting pipelines.
- Collaborate with data science and ML partners to design experiments, apply personalization/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.
- 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...- Prior experience with advertising platforms, ad tech integrations, or building ad surfaces in mobile apps.
- 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.
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:
$204,000-$306,000 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 [redacted].
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