Senior Engineering Manager, Monetization

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! ) 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. ) learners around the world.

About The Role

The Monetization Pillar focuses on Duolingo’s key business drivers—subscriptions, ads, and in-app purchases. Our goal is to build the best premium experiences for our learners while ensuring the sustainability and success of our business model. You will play an instrumental role in the strategic direction of Duolingo by developing and refining the methods that make our monetization efforts more effective and efficient.

We’re seeking engineering leaders who are passionate about bottom-line business impact, and who bring fresh insights and a creative technical approach. 🧠 You will... Co-lead a cross-functional pod with Product and Design to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for one of Duolingo’s Monetization teams.

Partner with design and product to ship experiences that feel native to Duolingo: delightful, well-paced, and respectful of the learner without compromising monetization performance. Collaborate with data science and ML partners to design experiments, apply personalization and targeting, and translate insights into product improvements and bookings growth. Own planning and execution for projects that directly impact revenue; identify the right team-level metrics to optimize and protect delivery through clear milestones and risk management.

Bring both technical and product perspectives to new ideas, enabling rapid hypothesis testing without sacrificing reliability, observability, or long-term maintainability. Set and uphold engineering quality standards and practices that improve reliability, scalability, and operability. ✅ You have...

Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent. Direct experience working on engineering teams that build and operate monetization systems. A track record of owning multi-engineer, multi-week technical projects to successful outcomes in a highly experimental, data-driven environment.

Strong product instincts and excellent written/verbal communication, with experience aligning diverse stakeholders across engineering, product, design, and analytics. Experience working closely with data, experimentation, or machine learning teams to inform prioritization and ship measurable impact (direct ML expertise not required). Demonstrated ability to raise the bar on engineering practices for reliability, scalability, and observability.

Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade‑offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices. ⭐ Exceptional candidates will have... Deep experience with ad mediation, waterfall, and bidding systems (AdMob, GAM, Open Bidding, or equivalent), including onboarding and optimizing demand partners.

A strong track record of designing or shipping in-product ad formats and surfaces in mobile apps, with attention to UX quality and format performance. Experience improving ad quality and monetization through experimentation, targeting, or programmatic levers, in partnership with business teams. Background collaborating with sales/biz ops on direct or programmatic campaigns and translating market feedback into product improvements.