We're looking for backend engineers who have experience building and operating reliable, scalable systems. Your background may be in product engineering, infrastructure, platform engineering, or a combination of these. What matters most is strong backend fundamentals, sound systems thinking, and the ability to take ownership of complex technical problems from design through production.
Below you can find more information about the team we're hiring for:Duolingo Score:Duolingo Score is how we reflect a learner's real language proficiency back to them. As the team lead / backend engineer on this small, high-impact team, you'll help make learners care about their score as much as they care about their streak. You'll partner closely with the Score Pillar's product and design team and our iOS and Android engineers, working on the systems that power score calculation, proficiency modeling, and how score surfaces across the app - including integrations with external platforms like LinkedIn, so learners can showcase their proficiency beyond Duolingo.
Time Spent Learning:The Time Spent Learning team is dedicated to motivating learners to spend more time engaging meaningfully with the Duolingo app. Our mission is to grow genuine, sustained learning time by designing and iterating on the mechanics that motivate consistent, high-effort practice so learners make real progress toward fluency each day. As a small, cross-functional team of product, design, and engineering, we own a metric that shapes learning outcomes for millions of users and get to shape the Duolingo experience.
Ads:Duolingo's Monetization pillar builds the systems that fund our mission - from subscription packaging and advertising to ML-powered personalization. As a Backend Engineer on the Ads team, you'll work on a product engineering team responsible for growing and scaling Duolingo's ads business: high-quality ads that delight learners, fit seamlessly into the product experience, and meaningfully contribute to our bottom line. The team owns ad serving, mediation and demand, in-product ad formats and surfaces, and more. You'll work cross-functionally with product, design, data science, machine learning, and ad operations.
Observability:The Observability 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.
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
You have...- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a 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
☆ Exceptional candidates will have...- Industry experience building high-traffic APIs using public cloud providers
- Experience with industry observability technology, such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, or DataDog.
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:
$182,800-$247,300 USD
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 [redacted].
