Senior Engineering Manager, Retention

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.

We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact product engineering team in the Retention area. You will co-lead a cross-functional team with a Product Manager co-lead to improve learner habit formation and long-term engagement, while owning the team's roadmap, execution, and outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Co-lead a cross-functional team with your product partner, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for retention and habit-building features.
• Drive execution of projects from spec to implementation, experimentation/analysis, and ongoing ownership, while ensuring system reliability, scalability, and observability.
• Use data and rapid experimentation to inform decisions; partner with internal stakeholders to design A/B tests and translate insights into product improvements that measurably impact retention KPIs.
• Attract, grow, and retain diverse engineering talent; provide clear expectations, coaching, and career development, and build a healthy, inclusive team culture.
• Set engineering quality standards and processes that balance speed and long-term maintainability; proactively manage tech debt, product quality, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, research, and other engineering teams to deliver cohesive learner experiences across in-app and out-of-app surfaces.
• Define team OKRs, ruthlessly prioritize, and remove roadblocks so the team ships impactful work that moves company metrics.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent.
• A track record of shipping multi-engineer, multi-week+ projects with measurable business impact, balancing speed and quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort in highly experimental, data-driven environments; experience defining metrics and running A/B tests with analytics or data science partners.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product, design, and data; clear written specs and status updates.
• Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade-offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices.
• The ability to work from or relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.

Benefits:

• Salary Range: $204,000-$306,000 USD
• Equity compensation and world-class benefits