Senior Engineering Manager - AI Platform

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 the manager and team lead of the new AI Tooling and Ecosystem Team, you will lead the development of the suite of tools and services that power Duolingo's use of AI in the product. You'll lead a team of 5-6 engineers to design systems for managing datasets, evaluating the performance of AI models, and building AI workflows. You will help shape how Duolingo builds features using AI, enabling teams to easily define quality metrics, combine human and AI feedback, and compare model performance. We're looking for an engineering manager who has experience building AI products or infrastructure and is excited to play a central role in shaping the future of AI at Duolingo!

🧠  You will...

• Drive development of tools and services that empower Duolingo's product teams to easily and effectively build AI-powered features and workflows.
• Manage our shared systems and workflows for AI-related datasets, prompts, and evaluations (both human and LLM-as-a-judge).
• Build processes that allow teams to define success criteria for their AI use-case, identify the most appropriate models, and construct feedback loops for prompt optimization.
• Streamline common AI development flows so that teams with varying levels of AI expertise can build out AI systems quickly.
• Collaborate closely with the AI Core Infrastructure Team to ensure that AI workflows are reliable, measurable, and cost efficient.
• Partner with AI, Product, Data Science, and Platform leaders to build out new AI tooling that supports common use-cases.
• Own multi‑quarter roadmaps and cross‑functional alignment that increase AI feature velocity and measurable product impact across Duolingo.

✅  You have...

• Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software and/or AI engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent.
• A track record of building AI-related infrastructure or user-facing products powered by AI.
• Familiarity with AI evaluation methods, especially approaches that combine human and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations.
• Strong cross‑functional leadership and communication skills; proven ability to align AI, product, data science, and platform partners on strategy and execution.
• Comfort leading through ambiguity and shaping new ways of working in a fast‑evolving AI landscape.
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• The ability to work from or relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

• Hands‑on experience building evaluation systems and human‑in‑the‑loop data pipelines at scale.
• A track record of developing internal tools on a platform or infrastructure team, providing tools and services via easy-to-use APIs, MCPs, and web GUIs.
• Experience navigating build vs. buy decisions and shaping long-term roadmaps based on the needs of internal customers.