Senior Engineering Manager, New Initiatives

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.

Chess has reached millions of daily active learners since its launch 1 year ago – and we're just getting started! By expanding beyond language learning, Chess helps define how Duolingo brings high-quality, accessible learning to entirely new domains.

As a Senior Engineering Manager on Chess, you'll lead a product engineering team responsible for Duolingo's fastest-growing initiative. Your team will build core gameplay experiences, guide beginners from their first move to their first matches, and drive our strategy for becoming the best place to learn chess.

This role blends technical leadership, strong product intuition, and people management. You’ll partner closely with product, design, data science, and AI to define strategy, ship high-impact experiments, and help define what learning new subjects looks like at Duolingo.

• Form a dynamic duo with your product manager counterpart to co-lead a cross-functional team. You’ll collaborate closely with data scientists and machine learning researchers to define goals, shape experiments, and guide technical decisions.
• Provide both technical and product perspectives on new product ideas to ensure we find the fastest way to test a hypothesis.
• Own the planning, execution, and success of projects that directly improve our top-line business metrics like daily active users, and identify which metrics to optimize for at the team level.
• Set clear expectations around engineering quality and promote practices that enhance code quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Identify and drive technical initiatives that improve the reliability, timeliness, and efficacy of notification delivery.

• Developed your team, deeply understanding each engineer’s strengths and career goals, and proactively providing mentorship and stretch opportunities to help them grow their impact.
• Set clear expectations and hold a high bar for performance, regularly providing candid feedback, addressing challenges decisively, and maintaining a supportive environment where engineers feel valued, engaged, and empowered.
• Provided clarity and alignment, transparently communicating the “why” behind decisions, thoughtfully guiding your team through changes, and ensuring everyone understands their role in achieving team and company goals.

• 2+ years of experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers.
• 5+ years in software development focused on content or animation creation.
• Have a record of owning the execution of successful technical projects that span multiple engineers over multiple weeks.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

This is not inclusive of the rest of our awesome portfolio that includes equity compensation and world-class benefits. Our salary ranges are the same for all US locations. Your recruiter can share more details about the range for a specific level during the hiring process. The actual salary within the range is determined by many factors including but not limited to, skills, experience, education, and internal equity.