Engineering Director, Product Area

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. But we’ve got more left to do — and that’s where you come in!

Duolingo is the world's most popular learning app. Beyond our core learning product, we also offer English proficiency testing with the Duolingo English Test, and are bringing new subjects into the Duolingo app, where people can develop their Math and Music skills.

We are passionate about educating our users, making fact-based decisions, and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. We offer meaningful work, limitless learning opportunities, and collaboration with world-class minds. Come brighten your life and over half a billion more!

As an Engineering Director at Duolingo, you'll have the unique opportunity to shape the future of learning by leading cross-functional teams in developing innovative solutions. This role combines strategic leadership, business insight, and technical knowledge. Essential to the role is the ability to effectively handle complex leadership situations, ensuring alignment and delivering impact.

Learning R&D Area:

• The Learning R&D Area works on improving the learning experience of our users with new bets, technologies, and features, that fill the learning gaps in our product. Our goal is to make Duolingo the best way to level up your language skills, regardless of your proficiency level.

You will...

• Define the strategy and set the roadmap for your teams
• Be a strong cross-functional partner with product, design and data science (and other functions, depending on the product area) and invest in those relationships.
• Be an excellent manager of managers, training and coaching newer managers and engineering leads. 
• Navigate complex leadership skills of being inclusive of different viewpoints; checking for alignment; and knowing when it’s best to pushback vs. make a decision vs. “disagree and commit.”
• Shape key decisions about architecture and implementation of scalable and high quality engineering solutions
• Drive the planning, execution, and success of elegant technical projects

You have...

• Strong technical chops. This is table-stakes. Our engineering leads are not only excellent people managers, team builders and strategic thinkers. They also have the deep technical background which allows them to “trust, but verify” that the right technical decisions are being made and that their area is executing strongly. They allocate time for learning in order to stay on top of technical advances.
• Strong business acumen. This means having a deep understanding of their part of the business; following industry trends; and being able to think several years ahead.
• Solid product sense. Engineering leads at Duolingo don’t “stay in their lane.” They use the product and features that they are building every day, are deeply familiar with how it works and have strong opinions of what’s working well in the product, what could be improved, and what to build next. They also use products/apps from peer industries (gaming, for instance) to learn from best-in-class.

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Last updated on Aug 19, 2024