Senior Director of Engineering
Lead engineering for Duolingo's New Subjects (Math, Music, Chess) pillar. Drive strategy, scale AI-powered products, and manage 100+ engineers across multiple high-growth initiatives.
About the job
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.
Skills
AI, LLMs, Unity, Engineering Leadership, Product Strategy, Experimentation, Talent Management, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Operational Excellence, Team Building
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