Duolingo

Senior Engineering Manager, Product

Duolingo$204K — $306K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience leading software engineering teams.
  • Proven record of delivering impactful, multi-engineer projects.
  • Familiarity with data-driven experimentation and A/B testing.
  • Strong communication skills for stakeholder engagement.
  • Technical proficiency to guide engineering practices.
  • Ability to work from Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.

Responsibilities

  • Co-lead a cross-functional team focusing on user impact through feature development.
  • Drive project execution from specification to implementation, ensuring scalability.
  • Utilize data and rapid experimentation to shape product improvements.
  • Attract and develop diverse engineering talent while fostering an inclusive culture.
  • Establish engineering quality standards and manage technical debt.
  • Collaborate with product and design teams to optimize user experiences.
  • Define team objectives and prioritize tasks to enhance team performance.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive healthcare coverage.
  • Retirement savings plans with company contributions.
  • Equity compensation opportunities for employees.
  • Flexible working hours and remote work options.
  • Professional development opportunities to foster career growth.
Full Job Description
Below you can find more information about the teams we're hiring for:

Growth:

We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact product engineering team focused on user growth. You will co-lead a cross-functional team to improve learner habit formation and long-term engagement through a variety of features, while owning the team's roadmap, execution, and outcomes. This role blends technical leadership, people management, and product strategy as you'll set direction for complex systems, foster an inclusive, high-performance culture, and create an environment for engineers to do impactful things. The role is based in Pittsburgh or New York.

Language Learning:

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!

Monetization:

The Monetization Pillar focuses on Duolingo's key business drivers-subscriptions, ads, and in-app purchases. Our goal is to build the best premium experiences for our learners while ensuring the sustainability and success of our business model. You will play an instrumental role in the strategic direction of Duolingo by developing and refining the methods that make our monetization efforts more effective and efficient. We're seeking engineering leaders who are passionate about bottom-line business impact, and who bring fresh insights and a creative technical approach.

You will...
  • Co-lead a cross-functional team with partners in product management, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for features that drive meaningful user impact.
  • 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 key product 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 teams focused on driving core product outcomes 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 teams or projects with broad cross-functional scope.


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.

About Duolingo

Duolingo is a language-learning platform that includes a language-learning website and app, as well as a digital language proficiency assessment exam. The company was founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker. Duolingo offers courses in over 40 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese. The platform is free to use, but users can pay for additional features. Duolingo has won numerous awards for its innovative approach to language learning.
Learn more about Duolingo
Size
400 employees
Market Cap
$2.7 billion
Industry
Founded
2011
NASDAQ

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Duolingo

More Consumer Technology Jobs

Find similar Senior Engineering Manager, Product jobs: