Engineering Manager, Chess

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.

As an Engineering Manager at Duolingo, you will own mission-critical projects from end to end, contribute to product strategy, and lead a team of world-class engineers.

You will lead and develop the Chess Teaching team in the Chess Area within the New Subjects Pillar at Duolingo. Duolingo's new chess course has quickly reached millions of daily active learners – and we're just getting started. We're looking for an engineering leader to own core curriculum infrastructure and lead the development of new learning features across the product. Come build with a high-powered, ambitious team that’s making the game of chess more delightful and accessible than ever.

• 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.

• Develop 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.
• Provide 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.