Senior Engineering Manager

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... 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 pod with Product and Design to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for one of Duolingo’s Monetization teams. Partner with design and product to ship experiences that feel native to Duolingo: delightful, well-paced, and respectful of the learner without compromising monetization performance. Collaborate with data science and ML partners to design experiments, apply personalization and 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. ✅ You have... Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent. Direct experience working on engineering teams that build and operate monetization systems. 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. Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade‑offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices. ⭐ Exceptional candidates will have... Deep experience with subscription systems at scale, billing and entitlements, StoreKit/Google Play Billing, receipt validation, renewals, refunds, and payment reliability across platforms. A strong track record of designing and shipping paywalls, upgrade flows, and trial experiences in mobile apps, with attention to UX quality and conversion performance. Experience running a high-velocity experimentation program on revenue surfaces, including ML-powered personalization and targeting of offers within consumer apps. Experience with pricing and packaging levers — plan/tier design, regional pricing, promotional offers, and family or multi-seat products — and the systems needed to test them safely. Demonstrated impact on subscriber retention and c…