Senior Engineering Manager

Duolingo; United States; On-site; USD 898,000 - 1,347,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Job summary

Duolingo is seeking an engineering leader for monetization to drive strategic direction and execution across subscriptions, ads, and in‑app purchases. You will partner with Product, Design, and Analytics to ship native, high‑quality experiences that balance learner value with monetization performance.

You will own project roadmaps, lead multi‑engineer initiatives, and raise engineering standards to ensure reliability, scalability, and observability.

Qualifications

• Experience leading software engineers and monetization systems.
• Track record of multi‑engineer projects in a data‑driven environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication across engineering, product, design, and analytics.

Responsibilities

• Co‑lead a cross‑functional pod with Product and Design to define strategy and roadmap for monetization initiatives.
• Ship experiences that feel native to Duolingo while optimizing monetization performance.
• Collaborate with data science and ML teams to design experiments and translate insights into product improvements.
• Own project planning and execution with clear milestones and risk management.
• Set engineering quality standards to improve reliability and maintainability.

Skills

Team leadership

Monetization systems

Cross-functional collaboration

Experimentation program

Data-driven decision making

Tools

StoreKit

Google Play Billing

Job description

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/vocal 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 churn: win‑back campaigns, cancellation flows, grace period and dunning handling, and lifecycle messaging informed by LTV modeling.
• Fluency with subscription economics and the metrics leadership cares about (trial‑to‑paid, ARPU, gross vs. net bookings, cohort retention, LTV/CAC), and experience building the instrumentation and reporting behind them.

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.

Salary Range: ¥898,302 — ¥1,347,453 CNY

Benefits: Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well‑being with our benefits 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 [e-mail].

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

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