Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Duolingo; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 247,000; Full time

Job summary

Duolingo, a leader in education technology, is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to work with product and platform teams to keep its distributed systems reliable and scalable with measurable quality. You will own reliability across services, drive operational excellence, and contribute to the design of robust software platforms.

The role requires experience reducing toil, improving automation, and guiding incident response.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in site reliability engineering or DevOps for products with millions of users.
• Experience identifying and solving issues in large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency with Java, Kotlin, Python or Go, and containerization/orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product and platform teams to ensure reliable, scalable services.
• Identify instability sources and drive operational excellence across systems.
• Diagnose production issues, runbooks, postmortems, and incident response.
• Provide system design consulting and contribute to tooling and automation.
• Support core infrastructure and release new features with reliability in mind.
• Reduce toil by improving automation and monitoring.
• Be the go-to expert for services and runbooks across engineering teams.

Skills

SRE/DevOps

Distributed systems

Java

Kotlin

Python

Go

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Mesos

Nomad

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 finding innovative solutions to complex technical problems , running countless experiments (300+ at a time!) with our massive user base to make data-driven decisions, and educating our users and employees alike. You'll have limitless learning opportunities, mentorship and collaboration with world‑class minds, and a variety of projects with large scopes - while doing work that’s both fun and meaningful.

Join our life‑changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.

About the role...

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will work closely with both product and platform engineering teams to ensure Duolingo’s sophisticated distributed systems and products are built and maintained with extraordinary quality, and operated in measurable and scalable ways.

• Collaborate with internal teams to identify sources of instability in distributed systems and drive operational excellence
• Support core infrastructure (i.e understand, diagnose, and debug these systems in production)
• Provide system design consulting, develop software platforms/frameworks, and conduct launch reviews and root cause analysis
• Maintain and document sustainable postmortem/incident response practices
• Advocate for and implement changes that improve reliability, scalability, and velocity
• Reduce the burden of toil with iterative development of tooling and automation
• Collaborate with engineering teams to release new features and become an authority on our services

You have...

• 5+ years of experience within site reliability engineering/DevOps of a product with millions of users
• Experience identifying and solving issues in large-scale distributed systems
• Experience with Java, Kotlin, Python or Go
• An understanding of containerization toolsets and container orchestration technologies (Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Nomad, etc)

Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience in improving automation and tooling to reduce service maintenance toil
• Proven experience driving improvements to incident response processes
• Experience assessing reliability and troubleshooting issues in Dynamo, MySQL, and/or PostgreSQL databases

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.

By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.

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

AI in Hiring: Duolingo uses AI technology to assist in our hiring process. We want to be transparent about how we use this technology and your rights. We use Greenhouse Software's Talent Matching feature to assist with reviewing applications for the skills and experience we have decided are important for this role.

Voluntary Self Identification

To fulfill our mission of developing the best education in the world and making it universally available, we seek exceptional talent for every role. We recruit candidates from diverse backgrounds. To help us evaluate our hiring process for equitability, we invite U.S. applicants to share their demographic information. Participation in this survey is voluntary and confidential. Participation will not affect any hiring decisions or outcomes.