Senior Director of Engineering

Responsibilities

• Drive the product and technical strategy across Math, Music, and Chess, balancing short-term product impact with long-term strategic goals.
• Partner strategically with Product, Design, Learning and AI to evolve strategy, including decisions on when and how to expand to additional subjects.
• Lead multiple engineering directors and their teams as they tackle technical challenges: AI-based content creation and tutoring at scale, neural bots, and Unity-based gameplay.
• Drive operational excellence across Duolingo’s engineering org, including reliability, performance, developer productivity, and efficient execution at scale.
• Contribute to Duolingo’s engineering hiring bar and talent systems, playing a central role in hiring decisions, leveling, and organizational design.
• Lead an organization that moves quickly, runs high-quality experiments, and translates product insights into measurable business impact.
• Build and develop a strong leadership bench capable of bringing ambitious new products to market.

Requirements

• Experience leading large-scale consumer product engineering organizations (100+ engineers), ideally across multiple high-growth product experiences.
• Product instincts and experience partnering closely with senior product leadership to define strategy.
• A track record of driving measurable impact on business outcomes, including growing early product development through significant company scale.
• Experience building or scaling LLM-powered product features, with a strong interest in building engineering cultures that embrace AI-first ways of working.
• Deep experience building and scaling high-velocity, experiment-driven product organizations, leading through multiple layers of leadership (senior directors, directors, EMs).
• A track record of building high-performance, inclusive teams and making thoughtful, high-judgment talent decisions.
• Ability to influence senior executives and drive clarity in ambiguous, cross-functional situations.
• Ability to work from New York, NY office on a 4+1 hybrid work schedule.